1921-04-18

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(Questions answered orally are indicated by an asterisk.)
WAR EXPENDITURE- ADJUSTMENTS Mr. PARINEAU:
On June 5,	1919, the then Minister of
Finance, Sir Thomas White, in his budget speech made the following statement :*-*
"As the aggregate of our war issues exceeds our net war expenditures it is to be pointed out that during the war we were enabled to make advances to Great Britain for her purchases in Canada to a greater extent than we availed ourselves of advances from the Imperial Government to meet our war expenditure in England and on the continent. The result is, that there is owing to us by the Imperial Government a balance, after making the necessary set-offs, of about two hundred and thirty million dollars. This is subject to reduction by the unascertained amount which we shall pay in respect of increased charges for ammunition at the front since September 1, 1917. An inquiry is now being made for the purpose of adjusting this charge."
1.	Is this inquiry completed?
2.	If so, what is the decision arrived at?
3.	Who conducted the said inquiry?
4.	Who represented Canada at the said inquiry?

Mr. DUFF:: 1.	Was a concrete tug sold to the Department of Marine and Fisheries during the last three years by the Montreal Dry Docks and Ship Repairing, Limited, or by interests associated with the said Company?
2.	If so, what was the tonnage and price paid for the said tug, and when was she built?
3.	Has the Montreal Dry Docks and Ship Repairing, Limited, done all the repairs of Government vessels at Montreal since 1917? If not, what other Company had the repairing of the said vessels during the said period?
4.	How much has been paid the Montreal Dry Docks and Ship Repairing, Limited, since 1917, for repairs, and all other work done to Government vessels?
5.	Is Mr. Thomas Hall, President and General Manager of the Montreal Dry Docks and Ship Repairing, Limited?
6.	If so, what relationship does Mr. Hall bear to the Minister of Marine and Fisheries?


Hon. Mr. BALLANTYNE:: 1.	One concrete vessel was purchased from the Montreal Shipbuilders, Limited, in 1918.
2.	Tonnage 320 tons gross, 176 tons net. Built 1917. Price paid above firm was $76,269.63, being actual cost of construction as determined by Messrs. A. K. Fiske Skelton Co., chartered accountants, without any allowance for interest during construction or profit.
3.	In so far as the Department of Marine
and Fisheries is concerned the following firms have made repairs to its vessels at Montreal since 1917: 1917 Marconi Wireless Telegraph Co., $117; 1917 Canadian Vickers, Ltd., $4,857.50;	1917 Canadian
Vickers, Ltd., $18,881; 1919 Montreal Dry-dock and S.R. Co., $18,279; 1920 Hall Engineering Works, $162.87.
4.	Answered by No. 3.
5.	No. Mr. John Lumsden of Ottawa is president and Mr. Hall js managing director.
6.	The late Mrs. Thomas Hall, who died nine years ago, was a sister of the present Minister of Marine and Fisheries.


HALIFAX FISHERY AWARD
Mr. SINCLAIR (Guysborough) :: 1.	What is the date of the Halifax Fishery Award ?
2.	W'hat is the amount of the award?
3.	On what date was the money paid over to the Receiver General?
4.	Under what authority is the Ashing bounty so-called, paid to Canadian fishermen?
5.	When was the legislation authorizing the payment of this bounty passed and when did it become operative?
6.	Who got the benefit of the interest on the Award between the date when the money was paid to the Receiver General and the date when the payment of the bounty commenced?


Hon. Mr. BALLANTYNE:: 1.	Nov. 23, 1877.
2.	$5,500,000, of which Canada's share was $4,500,000.
3.	On Jan. 31, 1879, Canada received from the Imperial Government on account of the Halifax Award $4,490,882.64. Ex-

penses against the award then outstanding amounted to $133,351.56, leaving a balance of $4,357,531.08, which amount was credited to the Receiver General of Canada on the above date.
4.	The Deep Sea Fisheries Act, Chap. 46 of the Revised Statutes of 1906.
5.	May 17, 1882. It became operative that year.
6.	The Canadian Exchequer.


CHARTERED BANKS-TAXES PAID
Mr. CHISHOLM:: What was the total amount' paid by the chartered banks of Canada into the Government Treasury for taxes during the year 1920?


Right Hon.   S@: Tax on circulation under Special War Revenue Act collections in fiscal year ended March 31, 1921, $1,235,271.24. Assessments under Income War Tax and Business Profits War Tax Acts on business of calendar year 1919 have not yet been adjusted.


PARLIAMENT BUILDINGS FURNITURE
Mr. PAPINEAU:: 1.	From whom was the furniture in the new Parliament buildings purchased?
2.	Is the whole of said furniture Canadian made? If not, why?


Hon. Mr. McCURDY:: 1.	The furniture in the new Parliament Buildings was purchased from the following manufacturers: Valley City Seating Company, Dundas, Ont.; J. C. Scott & Company, Toronto, Ont.; Bromsgrove Guild (Canada) Limited, Montreal, Que.; Castle & Son, Montreal, Que.; Henry Morgan & Company, Montreal, Que.; George Roberts, Montreal, Que.; R. A. Sproule & Company, Ottawa, Ont.; Kent, McClain & Company, Toronto, Ont.; Globe Furniture Company, Waterloo, Ont.; Knechtel Furniture Company, Hanover, Ont.; Office Specialty Manufacturing Company, Newmarket, Ont.; Owen Sound Chair Company, Owen Sound, Ont.; Canada Furniture Manufacturers, Woodstock, Ont.
2.	Presumably the furniture is Canadian made with the exception of the screen in the Commons Chamber at the Speaker's Chair which was made of English Oak by Messrs. H. Hems & Son, Exeter, England, the same firm who are making the Speaker's chair which is being presented by the United Kingdom Branch of the Empire Parliamentary Association.


UNION SERVICE FUND
Mr. POWER:: With reference to the following statement by Sir Arthur Williamson, Parliamentary and Fin-

ancial Secretary to the War Office, which appears on page 2129 of the Parliamentary Debates of the British House of Commons, Volume 136 for December 23, 1920:
"Under the scheme of establishment of the Union Service Fund as sanctioned by the Government last year, working capital for the future conduct of the institutes of the navy and army and the air force is to be provided from the funds accumulated during the war"-
1.	Were any of the funds above-mentioned derived from Canadian soldiers?
2.	If so, is it the intention of the Government to protest against any decision which would have for effect to provide the British forces with funds for their canteens at the expense of soldiers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force?


Hon. Mr. GUTHRIE:: 1 and 2. Certain amounts derived from sales to Canadian soldiers are included in the profits of the Navy and Army Canteen Board. Action has already been taken to protest against any portion thereof being used as suggested.	.


DREDGE INTERNATIONALE
Mr. BOURASSA:: 1.	Has the Government rented the dredge Internationale to the Chicoutimi Port Commission, a trust company in the "Ha Ha Bay Sulphite Co."?
2i. If so, what amount has been paid to the Government for rent?
3.	If not, did the Government lend the dredge Internationale to the said commission?
4.	If so, what is the amount of expenses incurred by the Government since said dredge has been sent to Port Alfred, Chicoutimi, including towing, wintering, coal, salaries and table board of employees, maintenance and repairs?
5.	Has the Government been refunded for such expenses?


Hon. Mr. McCURDY:: 1.	No.
2.	Answered by answer to question number 1.
3.	No.
4.	$104,644.05.
5.	No.


CANADIAN GOVERNMENT MERCHANT MARINE-INLAND WATER NAVIGATION
Mr. ARMSTRONG (Lambton):: 1.	How many boats now in service or under construction by the Dominion Government are capable of passing through the canals and doing business on our inland waters?
2.	Does the Government intend placing any or all of the boats built and owned by them, and capable of being operated on our inland waters, during the present season?
3.	If not, will the Government give the reasons for not using the said boats?


Hon. Mr. BALLANTYNE:: 1. Seventeen.
2 and 3. The question of determining the routes upon which the vessels shall ply and

the business that they shall engage in, is in the hands of the Canadian Government Merchant Marine.
FRENCH TREATY Mr. LEMIEUX moved:
For a copy of- all correspondence and papers generally exchanged between the Minister of Trade and Commerce and the British Government in connection with the trade agreement between France and Canada.


Sir GEORGE FOSTER:: The papers
referred to in that motion were laid on the table of the House two or three days ago.


Mr. SPEAKER:: Motion dropped.
UNOPPOSED MOTIONS FOR PAPERS Mr. DOUGLAS for Mr. SHAW:
For a copy of all correspondence, telegrams and other documents exchanged between the Department of Justice and the Department of the Attorney General in the province of Alberta, in regard to the vacancy in the District Court Judgeship occasioned by the transfer of Judge McNeil to the Judicial District of Calgary.


Mr. HENDERS:: For a copy of all papers, documents, memoranda and correspondence with any member of the Government, concerning the demands and requests of the Associated Federal Employees of Ottawa, Union No. 66, and of F. W. Patterson, President, concerning the Civil Service Commission.


Mr. McMASTER:: For a Return showing amounts spent year by year for the last five years on wharves or other harbour improvements in all ports or harbours under Federal control throughout Canada, including cost of upkeep and superintendence; amount of revenue received therefrom; and number of ships and amount of tonnage making use of said ports and harbours.


Hon. Mr. BELAND:: That the House to-morrow resolve itself into committee on the following resolution:
That it is expedient to bring in a measure to amend The Maple Products Act, 1920, by repealing section two of the Act and providing in lieu thereof:-
1.	That no person shall manufacture for sale, keep for sale, or expose for sale or sell any article of food represented as maple sugar or maple syrup which is not pure maple sugar or pure maple syrup.
2.	That any maple sugar or maple syrup which is not up to the standard prescribed by the Gorvernor in Council under the Food and Drugs Act, 1920, shall be deemed to be adulterated within the meaning of the Food and Drugs Act, 1920.
3.	That the word "maple" may be used in combination with any other word or words or any letter or letters on the label or other mark, illustration or device, on a package containing any article of food resembling or being an imitation of or being a compound of maple sugar or maple syrup and other substances; and in such
cases the exact proportion of maple sugar or maple syrup in such articles shall be clearly indicated on the package.


COMMITTEE ON ESTIMATES
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Hon. RODOLPHE LEMIEUX (Maison-neuve and Gaspe) moved the following resolution:
That, in the opinion of this House, in order to co-ordinate and expedite the business of Parliament in a more intelligent and practical way, the Estimates of the various departments should, before being laid on the Table, be scrutinized by a special committee of the House, where officers would be summoned to appear with plans and reports bearing on each appropriation.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I shall attempt to present as briefly as possible nay arguments in. support of this resolution, which I need hardly say, is not offered in any party spirit. On the contrary, I am moving this resolution to bring to the attention of the House the expediency of saving time, and above all of saving money, and thereby reducing the burden of taxation as far as possible. If one reads the motion aright, its object is quite clear. The history of Parliament is that of its struggles, first, with the King, and then with the great aristocratic families which for a long time controlled public affairs in England. I shall not delve into history, but one has only to take a glance at the past to find that from the beginning-under the Plantagenets, then under the Lancastrians and the Tudors and until the Stuarts-the struggle was unceasing between the King, who was anxious to keep to himself the power of the purse, and the commoners. The revolution took place, and then Parliament asserted its right to control the national expenditure.
It is true that since the revolution in England Parliament has succeeded in maintaining its right to exercise the power of taxation, and the control of expenditure. But, as has been so well said by that well known author on the English constitution, Bagehot:
The House of Commons-now that it is the true sovereign and appoints the real executive- has long since ceased to be the checking, sparing, economical body it once was. It now is more apt to spend money than the minister of the day. I have heard a very experienced financier say: "If you want to raise a certain cheer in the House of Commons, make a general panegyric on economy ; if you want to invite a sure defeat, propose a particular saving."
Before the war, Mr. Speaker, the public expenditure of Canada was very large indeed. It had been increasing year by year, and for the increase I suppose both parties
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were responsible. But during the war it was natural, owing to war emergencies and necessities, that the expenditure should be tremendously increased. It has now reached enormous proportions, and if we are anxious to save the country we must revert to normal conditions, having regard, of course, to the sacred obligations taken by Parliament during the war. If we do not economize-we must not only preach economy but pratise it-if we do not retrench, we shall have all through this country the same restlessness as prevails in European countries, and we may have to face very perilous consequences. The population of this country will, by the next census be about nine millions, perhaps a little less, perhaps a little more. The debt of Canada has reached, in round figures, the sum of three billion dollars. I have not the figures for the net debt per head of population, but they were given to the House last year by no less experienced a financier than the member for Shelburne and Queen's (Mr. Fielding), and if members of this House will refer to those figures in the last Budget debate they will get an idea of the financial situation in which the country finds itself to-day.
It is true, as was pointed out (luring the ^course of a debate which took place in the House not very long ago, that Canada has enormous natural resources, but for their development we must have capital; and we all know that taxation, direct or indirect, will not invite to our country the foreign capital which is necessary to that development. En passant, I may say that before income tax was put into operation in Canada I myself advocated it; I believe that it is the best way of bringing to the attention of the public the realities of government. The moment the public attention is focussed through the income tax upon the administration of public affairs, good results will follow. But, having regard to all our commitments and obligations and to the very perilous financial situation in which Canada finds herself to-day, I believe-and every hon. member will, I am sure, believe with me-that hereafter the public will demand more control of expendi-tude than has heretofore been exercised.
I was reading the other day in an American review a few lines which can be aptly quoted in this connection. They are as follows:
The next uprising of the public will unquestionably be against reckless expenditures of public money and the consequent crushing taxation levies. War breeds contempt for economy. Billions are spent without thought for the pockets of those who have to provide the money. 
America was spending more money per day than any other belligerent when the war ended. Something akin to pride was felt over the magnitude of the sums we poured out. Taxes of unprecedented severity were paid by the public without demur or protest. But the time has come to call a halt to reckless expenditure of the people's money.
So that-I need quote no further-the time has come when Parliament must assert its power to curb the propensities of the Government toward reckless expenditure and such action will be in the interests of the Government itself. I shall demonstrate in a very few words how Parliament can by a very simple process focus the attention of every member on the Estimates which are brought down each year.
My motion does not propose the alteration of any essential, any elemental principle of the constitution. Of course, in matter of expenditures the initiative must and always will rest with the executive. The Cabinet is the committee of Parliament; it is supported by the majority and it is responsible to Parliament. But on the other hand no money can issue without a vote of this House, save with regard to sums which are provided by the Consolidated Fund Act. In that regard I wish to reaffirm the manly stand taken the other day by my young and brilliant friend, the hon. member for Dorchester (Mr. Cannon), in asking that, in future, sums which are thus taken out of the Consolidated Fund, be given more publicity than they are given in the Estimates. Indeed, I find that some of those amounts are not mentioned, whilst others are mentioned in the Estimates.
The whole law of the British Constitution is based upon the fundamental principle of parliamentary granting of Supply and control of expenditure. We all know that there are three stages before moneys are granted and their expenditure is authorized by Parliament. First, there is the granting by the House of Commons of the money estimated by the Cabinet to maintain its government, and to carry out its policy, the appropriation of grants to special specific purposes; second, there is the general criticism of the House of Commons in Committee of Supply of the manner in which the grants are spent; third, there is the auditing of the accounts by that officer who is under the control of both Houses of Parliament, the Auditor General, and there is also the Public Accounts Committee which can examine the Public Accounts as it see fit. But the question is whether the control of Parliament is a reality or whether it is a mere simulacrum. Everyone knows the present procedure in
i

this House. At a certain given date, at the beginning of the session, the Estimates are laid upon the Table by the Minister of Finance. Later on a motion is made that the House resolve inself into Committee of Supply. But although a discussion goes on in that Committee of Supply, really there is no scrutiny to speak of of each item, and, indeed, of the merits of the expenditure. There is no opportunity for members of the House to see upon which reports of expert officials in the various departments are based the expenditures mentioned in the Estimates. The members of the House of Commons have no opportunity of hearing witnesses as to the necessity of those expenditures, so that it is a mere formality, and as Davenport well says, the House of Commons, although it has scored against the King for the power of the purse, really has lost practically all control of expenditure. The whole control rests with the Government, and when a motion is made for a reduction of some Estimate, such a motion is generally considered as a motion of want of confidence and the House will not care to move for such a reduction or it very rarely does so. I was just quoting what Bagehot said:
The House of Commons-now that it is the true sovereign and appoints the real executive -has long since ceased to be the checking, sparing economical body it once was.
It was the sparing, checking, economical body when it had to fight its way against the King, who wanted, in bulk, the sums of money needed for his wars or other enterprises and who then spent the amount as he thought best in his interest.
Sir, the taxpayer will always look to his representative in Parliament for control of expenditure. The taxpayer in the country, the man in the street, does not know much about the officials in the various departments. He knows very little about the Auditor General; he knows very little about the Treasury Board; he knows that there is a Government; that that Government is supported by a majority in the House of Commons; he knows his member, and he looks to his member as the one who should control expenditures. But the member is after all very little informed, in spite of all the blue books which are distributed. The Estimates come in bulk; the consideration of the Estimates is very hasty, and as I said a moment ago, a motion to reduce any Estimate is generally considered as a motion of want of confidence. Besides that, when one considers what time is given to the close study and scrutiny of the Estimates, one comes to this conclusion, that after all, very little time is given to that study and scrutiny. According to the old usage of Parliament that grievances must precede supply, we know, as a matter of fact, that before such grievances are ventilated, very little time is left for the scrutiny of the Estimates. We are all witnesses and parties to that very obvious fact that, when the session has gone on week after week and month after month, suddenly in a frenzy of desire to prorogue, the members of the House of Commons vote millions after millions in a very hasty manner, especially those Estimates, ordinary or supplementary or emergency, which are laid on the Table during the last days of the session. Those grievances which consume the time of the House are a bar to the proper control which the House should have of the Estimates. As I have stated, the end of the session comes when millions are voted without due consideration.
What is the remedy to that situation? I always look upon the old Mother of Parliaments as the great mentor in matters of parliamentary government. We have the same institutions as England, and we intend to maintain them because they make for good government and, above all, for freedom. Once more what is the remedy to this situation? In England in 1912, but especially in 1917-18, the Committee on National Expenditure, a committee born of the stress of war, was appointed as a war measure by the House of Commons. That committee had for its functions to examine, analyze, and scrutinize the enormous expenditures entailed by war necessities. The committee, which was presided over by a gentleman I have the honour to know, Sir Herbert Samuel, the ex-Postmaster General of Great Britain, and now Governor of Palestine, made thirteen different reports to the House. Through its investigations in the various spending departments, such as the Admiralty, the War Office, and others, and its scrutiny of expenditures, that committee made enormous savings for the Motherland. I shall not enumerate the sums which were saved through its labours, but the House may find an enumeration of them in the different reports presented by that committee to the House.
As I stated a moment ago, that committee was appointed during the war, and it was at first thought that its activities would be limited to the duration of the war, but Sir Herbert Samuel and the distinguished members of the House of Commons
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who formed part of that committee thought it would be unpatriotic if the attention of Parliament and the country was not called to the urgent necessity of maintaining such a committee on the Estimates.
The committee's terms of reference were very wide. In the first place the committee was appointed-[DOT]
-to examine the current expenditure defrayed out of moneys provided by Parliament and to report what, if any, economies consistent with the execution of the policy decided by the Government may be effected therein.
In one of the reports I find the following words:
There was need of an active financial supervision, watching the methods adopted, detecting mistakes, suggesting improvements, preventing competition 'between departments in purchasing supplies and in obtaining labour, restricting rates of profit, inquiring into the numbers and organization of the vast new staffs employed. There has been a little of this, but very little in proportion to the need.
The committee report that:
Control of expenditure is, or should be, applied at four points; (1) by the head of the spending department or sub-department; (2) by the financial secretary or other minister in charge; (3) by the treasury; and (4) by Parliament. The form in which Parliamentary control is applied largely determines the form taken b£ the others.
Further on I find this:
We are of opinion that the existing procedure of the House of Commons is inadequate to secure proper Parliamentary control over the national expenditure.
Again:
A so-called committee of 670 members- and in the case of our next House of Commons, a committee of 235 members.
-cannot effectively consider the details of finance. The time at its disposal is closely restricted. It cannot examine witnesses. It has no information before ,it but the bulky volumes of the Estimates themselves, the answers of a minister to questions addressed to him in debate, and such facts as some private member may happen to be in a position to impart. A body so large, so limited in its time, so ill-equipped for inquiry, would be a very imperfect, instrument for the control of expenditure even if the discussions in Committee of Supply were devoted entirely to that end. But those discussions afford the chief, sometimes the only, opportunity in the course of the year for the debate of grievances and of many questions of policy. In the competition for time, those matters of greater interest, and often of greater importance, usually take precedence, and questions of finance are crowded out. And even if all these obstacles are overcome, and some rare occasion arises on which the House of Commons discovers and debates a case where a reduction in an Estimate appears desirable, and would be disposed to insist upon its view, the present practice, which regards almost every vote of the House , 
as a vote, not only on the merits of the question, but for or against the Government of the day, renders independence of action impossible. Under these conditions it is not surprising that there has not been a single instance in the last twenty-five years when the House of Commons by its own direct action has reduced, on financial grounds, any Estimate submitted to it. .	.	. The debates in Committee of Supply are indispensable for the discussion of policy and administration. But so far as the direct effective control of proposals for expenditure is concerned, it would be true to say that if the Estimates were never presented, and the Committee of Supply never set up, there would be no noticeable difference. Indeed, a large part of the Estimates are formally passed, year by year, under the closure at the end of each session, without even the appearance of discussion; while every item in every Estimate, whether closured or not, emerges from the Parliamentary process in precisely the same shape as ' it entered it.
I thought it advisable, Mr. Speaker, to quote these few lines from the thirteenth report, which I have only glanced at, in order to show the necessity of scrutinizing the Estimates more closely by another process than the one we now have through our Committee of Supply.
Among the principal recommendations of the Committee on National Expenditure I find the following, which I would ask my hon. friend the Minister of Finance to consider, and apply, if possible. First, they suggest that in the early stages of each session a standing committee on Estimates should be appointed, that committee not to interfere with the policy of the Government, but limited in its scope to inquiry, investigation and informaton as regards proposed expenditures, and having the obligation imposed upon it to report from time to time to the House.
The principal object of that committee would be to examine the Estimates, not with a view to increasing expenditures but for the purpose of suggesting desirable economies; and its personnel, apart from the members, would be supplemented by the appointment of an examiner of Estimates, who would have practically a free hand to seek all information necessary and to get reports from the heads of various departments, who originally would have prepared lists of expenditures in their respective branches. The examiner of Estimates would also have the right to inquire of other than official sources regarding the advisability of proposed expenditures. The reports of that standing committee would be tabled from time to time during the session and would be accorded the fullest consideration by the House itself. Sir Herbert Samuel and his fellow members thought that the

time had come, as is periodically the case with the British constitution and British parliamentary institutions, when a slight revolution might well be effected. The suggestion of a reduction in expenditures, made by that committee and endorsed by the House, would not, in their judgment, be considered as a want of confidence vote, provided that vote were in accordance with the suggestions contained in the report.
I do not wish to delay the House unnecessarily, Mr. Speaker, because I realize that this afternoon several hon. members have motions which they desire to expedite. I may be allowed, however, briefly to add, that the appointment of that standing committee by the Government, under the direction of the Minister of Finance, at the earliest possible juncture in the session, Would make for economy and efficiency and would prevent any possibility of fraud and waste. Nothing involving the expenditure of public moneys should be considered by the House unless previously scrutinized by the committee on Estimates. The House should know, also through that committee, by a process which I need not explain because it would entail too much time, the financial consequences that would follow any lesislation introduced in the House. It so happens that a minister of the Crown may introduce legislation, authorized by His Excellency, in the form of a money Bill without mentioning the sum involved, and the financial consequences, which may be important and far-reaching, are discovered only when it is too late. I have been in the Government myself and I know what happens. A certain item may be in the Estimates for the expenditure of, say, $5,000 or $10,000 for the construction of a pier or the erection of a public building. The item is voted with little discussion or none at all. Tenders are then invited and the contract is awarded; and the next year, when the Estimates are brought down, to its surprise the House finds that instead of $5,000 or $10,000 the amount really needed for the construction of the pier or the erection of the building is $50,000, $60,000, or, as I have seen in many an instance, as high as $100,000, although at the outset the requisition from the Committee of Supply was for the modest sum of $5,000 or so. The committee, therefore, would have the closest scrutiny possible of all such votes, and would ascertain, by calling proper witnesses and obtaining information generally, what the full financial consequences of any proposed legislation would be. The Estimates Committee
would be, indeed, the official informer of the House of Commons; or, to speak more plainly, it would be the watch dog of the treasury; and after a while the Government themselves would be grateful to that committee for the protection it would afford the Exchequer. The procedure would not be involved; it would not by any means be complex. Instead of being cumbrous and dilatory, it would be simple and expeditious; and it would wield a powerful influence for good in the country.
Mr. Speaker, even if I were to speak for an hour longer on the subject I should not be able to bring greater conviction to the minds of my hon. friends on both sides of the House. I am simply asking the House of Commons to ponder this matter seriously. We must not only preach economy; we must practise it. We must co-ordinate and expedite the business of Parliament. If we appointed that committee its reports would be accepted by the House of Commons, and, Mr. Speaker, I am confident that the general result would be to prevent any such wrangles as we had not so long ago. Furthermore, the Government would rarely find it necessary to enforce the closure. I think that this committee would make for the expeditious despatch of the business of the House; but, above all, it seems to me that, in the main, it would help towards a substantial reduction of ill-considered expenditures and would thereby reduce the taxation bill of the country.
Mr. F. L. DAVIS (Neepawa):: On every reasonable occasion which has offered during the past three sessions, I have advocated the establishment of a committee on Estimates in connection with this House. It is therefore with pleasure that I rise on this occasion to support the motion now before the House. So far as I know, the first suggestion which was seriously considered by the British House was made in 1902 by a committee of that day on national expenditure. The idea was given effect to in 1912 and a committee was then set up. That committee first examined into the methods of the various departments in preparing their Estimates and made an examination into one of the small departments-the Office of Works. In 1913 it took up the navy Estimates. Some twenty-two sessions of the committee were held, somewhere about 4,500 questions were asked and answered, and the appendices of the evidence, adduced before the committee, and so forth, amounted to 500 pages. The committee made its report, and if any member

after reports and recommendations by several committees, to decide whether these changes can be brought about. But, as I have said, now is the time when there is the need for such changes, and when there is that break in continuity of comparison that makes this the ideal opportunity. I think the House and the country also at this juncture, when we have been forced to put through certain Estimates under closure, are of opinion that this is a time for considering some method which will give reasonable opportunity for the examination proposed, not merely by a committee but by the House also, because the House can through the committee find opportunities of getting information that it would like to have, and on the whole the time of the House will be saved by the operations of the committee.
I regret reading so much into Hansard, but these are considered statements and they are so well phrased that I do not think I can do better than read the conclusions and recommendations found at the end of the ninth report. They are contained in section 29 and are as follows:
(1)	We are of opinion that the existing procedure of the House of Commons is inadequate to secure proper parliamentary control over the national expenditure.
(2)	We recommend that there should be appointed each session two Standing Committees on Estimates, each consisting of fifteen members, and that a third should be added if experience showed that this was desirable.
(3)	It should be the duty of the committees to consider the Annual Estimates, and such Supplementary Estimates as the conditions allowed, and to report to: the House any economies which they regarded as desirable, and which did not raise questions of policy.
(4)	For the assistance of the committees there should be appointed an officer of the House with the title of Examiner of Estimates.
(5)	Opportunity should be provided for the consideration by the House of the recommendations of the committees in the manner proposed in paragraph 16.
I have already read that paragraph.
(6)	It should be established as the practice of Parliament that members should vote freely upon-motions for reductions made in pursuance of recommendations of the Estimates Committees, and that the carrying of such a motion against the Government of the day, should not be taken to imply that it no longer possessed the confidence of the House.
(7)	The form in which the Estimates are framed should be remodelled, in accordance-with the recommendations in our Seventh Report of the present session.
(S) There should be a vote on account for Navy, Army and Air Services at the beginning of each session.
(9)	Where an Estimate involves a commitment to a larger expenditure in subsequent years, the fact should, subject to the qualifica-

tion mentioned in paragraph 20, be stated in the Estimate.
(10)	The terms of Money Resolutions for Bills involving expenditure should be placed upon the Notice Paper of the House. They should embody, or be accompanied by a White Paper furnishing a statement of the probable amount. If the conditions did not allow such a statement to be framed, a White Paper should be presented giving the reasons.
(11)	Any statement furnished in connection with a Money Resolution should be referred to one of the Estimates Committees for examination and report, unless the House should dispense with that procedure in any particular case.
(12)	The classification of the Supply Votes should be reviewed.
(13)	The Comptroller and Auditor General should be authorized to report to the Public Accounts Committee on matters needing their attention, as and when they are brought to light in the course of his continuous audit.
(14)	The Committee of Public Accounts should be invited to consider whether a Return on the lines of the National Income and Outgo Return of 1909 should be presented annually to Parliament.
This is the summary prepared in answer to an inquiry on motion moved by Mr. Harold Cox, and gives such information as we cannot now get of the cost of any of our departments.
(15)	A minister should not be at liberty to dissociate himself publicly from his colleagues in matters of expenditure, and to throw upon the Treasury alone the onus of refusing a particular grant affecting his Department.
(16)	The Treasury should cease to be itself a spending Department.
A great deal more could be said with regard to certain aspects of this matter- the question of accounting, and so on. But without going fully into the matter I think the House will agree that one of the things that any business organization is most concerned in is whether its accountancy system is such as will give it a view of its whole transactions during the course of a year or any other stated period. The fundamental defect of our present system is that we do not get that view of our proceedings, and a change in our book-keeping is necessary in order that this should be broug'ht about and that Parliament should have this essential information. If we do otherwise we shall simply be blundering on, making savings possibly only in detail, not in gross, not with due regard to our whole requirements.
With regard to the form of the resolution, it seems to me that it would be better to refer this matter to a committee for consideration. I do not think that the House, upon hearing the eloquent address of the hon. memjber for Maisonneuve and my stumbling one, will be persuaded that it should at once take this step. But I do

think that the matter of the appointment of such a committee is eminently a subject for examination by a special committee of the House. I was led to understand last session that the Minister of Finance (Sir Henry Drayton) was favourable to that course. I trust that he still holds the same view.	.


Mr. MICHAEL CLARK (Red Deer):: Mr. Speaker, those of us who have sat for some years in this House with my hon. friend from Maisonneuve (Mr. Lemieux) have long ago learned to admire what I venture to call his parliamentary indefatigability, and* I have the greatest pleasure in congratulating him on his terse, forcible and convincing statement to-day on the most important question which he has brought before this House.
A great English writer has said something to the effect that if he could be shown how a man gets money, saves money, and spends money, he would tell you what the man was made of. I think the same thing applies in very large measure to a government. I have frequently quoted an epigram of Cobden's in this House which was quoted more than once by Gladstone, to the effect that public economy is public virtue. Lavish expenditure on the part of governments is a terrible public evil, carrying in its train many others. I am firmly convinced that at the present moment lavish expenditures on the part of governments in this country are contributing in no small degree to keeping up that high cost of living which most of the rank and file of [DOT] the people deplore and suffer from; I am equally convinced that lavish expenditures on the part of governments contribute in no small degree to the maintenance and extension of unemployment. This being so, I do not think any other question before the people of this country at the present time is of quite the importance, perhaps, of that which has been raised by my hon. friend in his resolution to-day.
A tolerably long experience has convinced me that irresolute and academic words on public expenditure fall like the proverbial drop of water on the back of the proverbial duck. To be of any use a protest against public expenditure must be resolute-taking the form if need be, of an all-night sitting, Mr. Speaker-and not only resolute, but, if possible, concrete. Now, one of the advantages of a committee such as they have in the Old Country and such as my hon. friend proposes is that you would have a selected number of men devoting their attention, as I understand it, from day to day and until their work was completed
in any given session, to concrete detailed items of the public expenditure. I think it must be apparent to any of us who have watched the proceedings of Parliament that such a committee could only result in very great good.
I should like to endorse what my hon. friend said about the value of direct taxation in the way of inculcating public economy. Mr. Gladstone used to say that the tenderest portion of an Englishman's anatomy was his trousers pocket, and I think very much the same is true of a Canadian; the pocket in which he carries his " long green " is extremely sensitive. The trouble about indirect taxation is that he does not know when the pocket is touched. I venture to think that well as my hon. friend the Minister of Finance (Sir Henry Drayton) is shaping in his new office, at the present time he is looking anxiously for some method by which he may pluck the goose without making her squawk. Well, I trust he will not be too successful in his researches in that direction but will assume an attitude of stern public morality and seek out methods of taxation which will be righteous and just methods, and that he will not care whether the application of them is accompanied by considerable squawking on the part of the goose. As a matter of fact, it is only when you make the electors complain that you make them understand what your policy has cost them, in whatsoever line that policy may show its activities.	[DOT]
My hon. friend said in introducing this matter that he was sure that the public were making demands along this line. I think that is true of a considerable portion of the public. I am quite sure our business men are largely alive to the serious state of our national finance-not too serious a state, but still a serious state, and the need for rigid economy on the part not only of this Government, but of all the governments of Canada. I know this: that whatever the public are demanding, the public interest is demanding and demanding strongly that attention should be directed to this matter along some such lines as are suggested by my hon. friend's resolution.
The hon. member did well to draw our attention to the importance of British precedents in this matter-precedents, I may say, Mr. Speaker, which, if we look over the history of the last hundred years, have on the whole been largely followed by both the old parties in the Old Country. There has been no monopoly by either of the old parties, during that period of a century

of public virtue or public morality in this matter of careful examination of how the public moneys were raised and how they were spent. In the wonderful balance sheet which Britain shows for the year ending on the 31st of last month the public expenditures were cut down by no less a sum than two . billion dollars, a sum amounting to practically the public debt of Canada. I have not the least doubt in my mind that that effect, in the last fiscal year in Great Britain, has been brought about largely by the committees whose operations have been so interestingly and admirably described to us by the hon. member for Maisonneuve this afternoon. I do not want to elaborate what he has said about the way in which this committee should work; but I want to emphasize this one point, namely, that such a committee would have an advantage, in being removed for the moment from the public eye. They would direct their attention-and this is a matter all-important in this connection- in the case of any given expenditure, more to the national than to the local bearing of it. I do not want to use words in condemnation of any government. In connection with a resolution of this kind we are dealing with principles of government that prevail amongst us, and I am sure we are all animated by a desire to improve those principles and procedures. I very much fear that in Canada, on the part of both the old parties in the State, there has been too great a tendency to look at the local effects of an expenditure. I am very much afraid that sometimes a member has been known to press for an expenditure in his constituency from the point of view of the political effects of that expenditure on his individual fortunes. I am not at all sure that governments, both Grit and Tory, have not undertaken very considerable expenditures in the past having their eye keenly focussed, not on whether the expenditure was for the general good of all the people of Canada, that is for the national advantage, but whether it was for the good of the political prospects of the administration in power. Of course, an administration that is in power, no doubt, is always firmly persuaded that the maintenance of itself in power is a great national advantage. In that view there is an acute difference from them on the part of the Opposition. In our candid moments, however, we will all admit that we shall get along better in the proper handling of public moneys when taxes are raised on the one hand and spent on the other with a view purely to the national [Mr. M. Clark.:
good. From that point of view I think a committee would have an advantage over the House in the first study of Estimates. They would be appointed with a national purpose; they would act in the national interest; and the House itself would no doubt be left to thresh out the matter in the broader atmosphere of our debates in this chamber, when local interests would appear. But a government, resolutely determined along proper lines of conduct in regard to the expenditure of public moneys, would be strongly reinforced by a sane and well-considered decision of such a committee as my hon. friend proposes.
I have the very greatest pleasure, on these grounds, in saying a word 'in support of the resolution of the hon. member for Maisonneuve, and I want to couple with that another word of thanks to him for the eloquent and painstaking maiiner in which he has introduced his resolution. (


Right Hon.   S@: Mr. Speaker, I feel, and no
doubt the House generally feels that we are all indebted to the hon. gentleman for introducing this resolution, particularly having regard to the way in which he has introduced it,-to the subject of his address and to the object which he has declared his anxiety to attain, namely, the utmost economy and care in the expenditure of our public moneys. I entirely agree with everything that he has said and that other hon. gentlemen have said on the necessity for economy. In fact, I do not know any one who would feel more particularly assisted and helped than myself, if hon. gentlemen could find out anything which, in the public interest, we could do without or ought at the present time to do without. The question is not at all what we desire to do, what is necessary to be done, but rather how it can best be done.
There are, of course, one or two questions which of necessity must worry us in Our consideration, as they worried the Mother of Parliaments in her consideration, because she is finding some difficulties with this committee. I do not know that it is going on; indeed, my advice is that at the present time it is not going on. The things that have been troubling her, in the first instance, are questions whether or not, having regard to our parliamentary institutions, the expenditure must not be something which has to rest entirely upon the responsibility of the Government and of a department, and whether or not that responsibility is not something which they cannot in any way diminish by the appoint-

ment of this or that committee. Of course, it was in the hope on the one hand of investigation and on the other of a retention of proper ministerial responsibility, that the exceptions, which have been pointed out by my hon. friend who first spoke on the question, of policy on the one side and other information on the other, have been constantly kept in view. Of course, had the committee to do with policy itself, there would have been an end to all responsibility one way or the other.
The matter is, I say, a difficult one, and it has gone further back than hon. gentlemen have pointed out. England has been troubled with this matter for a long time. Her House is bigger than ours; her expenditures are far greater than ours; the multitude of her considerations is infinitely greater than ours. So it is that as far back as 1887 this question engaged the attention of the British House. As a result of motions adopted in 1887, three committees were appointed in 1888 to consider army, navy and revenue departmental Estimates. They were appointed simply because the British Parliament recognized that it had so much to do that it could not properly control all the expenditures and votes, and it wanted to see if this would not be a very much better method if it was passed. After those committees were appointed, the next we hear is in 1903, when the committee of that year recommended that an Estimates Committee should be appointed continuously in the same way and possessing the same powers as the Public Accounts Committee. Nothing was__done. The experience of previous committees was not satisfactory. In 1912, however, experimentally the House adopted a standing committee on the Estimates. Now the difficulties of the situation, as set out by English authority-and I prefer to deal with the matter entirely from the standpoint of English authority, which is the only experience we have, and as hon. members have said, it is a very excellent authority-have been stated very well by Colonel A. J. V. Durell, in his book "Principles and Practice of the System of Control over Parliamentary Grants." He is probably as good, if not a better English authority on this question than any one else, and in this book, which is a standard work, frequently quoted, he says
The difficulties of the position and the necessary restrictions which must be placed on such a committee and which must inevitably limit its scope and possible sphere of usefulness were fully recognized by Parliament ....
The most obvious way for securing parliamentary control over the Estimates is that a select committee should examine them in detail before they are presented and while they are still in a stage where reductions can be made on non-party lines without such proposals being considered as motions adverse to the Government, as is the case when the Estimates have been presented to the House as the policy of the Government. Any procedure of this sort, however, strikes at the root of the fundamental principle of ministerial responsibility. "There must be no committee," said the Chancellor of the Exchequer, "that will divest the executive of its responsibility."
Another authority .... declared that the adoption of a proposal to submit the Estimates to a committee for preliminary examination and approval before presentation to the House would diminish the proper responsibility of the executive for the public expenditure and would interfere with the constitutional relations between the Government and the House of Commons. The duty of the House of Commons is to decide whether the expenditure which the various departments propose is absolutely needed for the efficiency of the public service, and to see that all money is wisely spent and that the nation gets the full equivalent for the outlay. The latter duties are post mortem and may safely be delegated to the Public Accounts Committee without the breach of any constitutional principle being involved. The former duty is pre-natal and must be exercised by the House of Commons itself.
Then, at page 143, he says:
By the English arrangement of examining the Estimates, ministerial responsibility is increased, as the proposals which form the ensemble of the Budget are altogether the work of the Cabinet, whose liability is undivided .... No proposals subversive of this important fundamental principle of the constitution could be embodied in any scheme for securing closer parliamentary control and it was for this reason Gladstone did not proceed in the matter when considering the possibilities of referring the Estimates to a committee to be gone into as a matter of business	 The chief danger to be apprehended in appointing a committee to examine the Estimates was therefore the possibility of interfering with ministerial responsibility; for anything like a revision of the Estimates by a committee on behalf of the House of Commons would inevitably afford a department ground for urging that the House had implicitly accepted a portion at least of that responsibility which should belong to the department itself, such a weakening of ministerial responsibility would result in a department putting forward increased and possibly unjustifiable and less carefully revised Estimates, with the knowledge that it might subsequently disclaim responsibility while benefiting therefrom. The more the responsibility of the department is weakened the more extravagant it is likely to be.
A good deal more along the same line will be found from page 143 on. I am not going to trouble the House with the details given by this English authority. They are collected by him and references are made to the different reports in this book.
The conclusion that has been come to seems to be that the continuously and



rapidly increasing size of the Estimates and the growing helplessness, or, at all events, the absolute inability of the House of Commons properly to control them in detail compel the adoption of some measure, even if it is only partial, to meet this difficulty. The work of that committee in England was only partial, as has been pointed out. Some years one department would be considered, and sometimes more than one, and some years there would be no complete report on any department. We come back to the fact that the English standing committee was set up in 1912. The order of reference to that committee was:
That a select committee be appointed to examine such of the Estimates presented to this House as may seem fit to the committee and to report what, if any, economics consistent with the policy implied in those Estimates should be effected therein.
Hon. members will see that there was no attempt made to hand all the Estimates over to the committee, such as is here proposed, but the right was given to this committee in 1912 to go into such department or departments as they desired to go into. How did this work out? The Estimates are referred to the committee only after having been presented to the House, and the committee's report is not made until July, when as a matter of fact most, if not all, of the Supply has been voted. The committee could not do better in view of the time when the Estimates were tabled. The results from its labours were not immediate and could only be seen in connection with the Estimates of succeeding years. They could not be carried into the business of the House for the current year. In some instances the work of the committee has been extremely effective in connection with the Estimates of perhaps one or two years later. The principles they worked out, and the business reforms they indicated, were sometimes very usefully adopted and carried into effect two or three years afterwards, although, of course, they had absolutely nothing to do with the Estimates of the year when the recommendations were made. The committee functioned for two years, up to the outbreak of the war. In 1912 it dealt with a very important matter, the Civil Service votes. I do not know whether hon. gentlemen will think that that committee got along very much better having regard to the size of the Civil Service votes in England, than the Civil Service Commission is doing here, which is performing exactly the same function as was performed by that committee in England. It made

two full reports and in 1914 submitted the evidence taken. The result of the whole question as laid down by this authority is as follows:
From a general review of its work

That is, the work of the committee.

it is difficult to arrive at any other conclusion than that, in the main, it covers little ground that is not already covered by the Public Accounts Committee.
I am sorry I cannot at the moment say whether or not that committee- is functioning in England this year. I myself have not seen any reports lately, but perhaps the hon. member for Neepawa (Mr. Davis), who is following this subject closely, can tell me. At any rate, that is the way the matter stood at that time in regard to English practice and English experience. It is not improbable that there would be difficulties in working out a proper solution by the apparently short and easy way of appointing a committee on Estimates. I hope we shall be able to find some method by which not only full parliamentary responsibility, but absolute departmental and ministerial responsibility can he maintained, and a greater care exercised in connection with commitments. The hon. member for Maisonneuve states that he has known of cases where although the initial vote was something like $5,000, the final expenditures totalled $100,000. Well, I have no hesitation in saying that such a situation is entirely wrong, and a practice of that kind seems to me to be little short of obtaining money under false pretences. If it is soberly said that the building of a certain bridge or pier will involve the expenditure of only $5,000, and it is discovered that, as a matter of fact, it means $100,000, obviously that situation is entirely wrong. There is a great deal in what is said by the hon. member for Neepawa when he addresses himself to our book-keeping and our methods of keeping accounts. Personally, I think there is quite a lot to be said in favour of a pre-audit system which will be absolute in its working. After all, what good do we really get from the long and expensive report which we now have every year from the Auditor General? It costs a great deal to print and is extremely voluminous; but what real good is it? When is it ever made use of to any real purpose? As a general rule, it is never used unless someone thinks there is room for attack on the Administration. There are whole sessions when the Public Accounts Committee is not once called, and yet its functions are very

similar to the functions of the Committee on Estimates under the British practice. After all, the great thing is to hold on to your money and see that any expenditures that you do make are proper. And the pre-audit system is one of the best ways of ensuring that; it prevents money getting out improperly. I think we shall all agree that something ought to be done to safeguard the country from being committed to large expenditures when only a nominal vote is first asked for, and the only way to do that is to see that for every expenditure called for there is a proper, signed report on the authority of the proper expert departmental officer in charge, as to what the cost of the undertaking will be. In connection with the clarification of accounts, I think we are already making some little progress. I do not know whether the hon. member for Neepawa has observed the accounts this year; if he has, he will notice that the balance sheet is fairly clear, showing not only capital account but all disbursements and receipts. If the hon. member has not gone over it I should like him to do so, and if there is anything further he thinks should appear in it I should be glad if he would let me know. Mr. Speaker, I think our interests are all identical on this question. We are trying to find what is the best way of safeguarding public expenditures, and I am sure that the discussion this afternoon will prove helpful. Under the circumstances, I would ask my hon. friend to consider whether he has not already achieved his purpose and might not properly withdraw his motion.


Mr. T. M. M. TWEEDIE (West Calgary) :: I have listened to this discussion with a great deal of interest, and I think we owe a debt of gratitude to the hon. member for Maisonneuve for having introduced the subject. If I felt that it was a matter for a resolution which, if carried into effect, would be productive of good, I should certainly be glad to support it. But I am not of this opinion; I believe that we should only be pyramiding committees in the House if we appointed such a committee as is suggested. So far as I can see, it would be a useless committee; it would be in the nature of a fifth wheel to a cart. The conditions that make desirable the existence of such a committee in the Imperial House are altogether different from the conditions here. In the ordinary course of events, it takes practically the whole year for them to transact business in the British House, where there is a vast
140J
volume of business for consideration which could by no possibility be brought before this House. I refer particularly to municipal legislation in regard to England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and matters generally connected with the business conducted by our provincial governments. What is the practice in connection with the expenditures of public moneys in this country? If any man goes to a department in connection with an estimate for any public work to be carried on in his constituency, he will often discover that, although the department heads have recommended the expenditure to the minister in charge, and notwithstanding that the appropriation has reached the stage of being included in the Estimates which are submitted by the minister, it is struck out by the cabinet. We have first, the responsibility of the deputy ministers who are in charge of the various departments, and their practice is to scrutinize the several Estimates very closely and eliminate all unnecessary expenditures before they submit them to the ministers. The Estimates for each department then go to the minister in charge of that department, and having been reviewed by him are submitted, I understand, to the Treasury committee of the Council, and having undergone examination by them are again subject to review by the whole Cabinet. The Estimates pass through all these stages; can any greater care be exercised in revising the Estimates of expenditures which are to go before the House? After having passed through all these stages the Estimates are then submitted to the House of Commons and come before the Committee of the Whole. Now what would be the result of the operations of the committee that is suggested? If such a committee were appointed, and if it had absolute jurisdiction, and if its findings and recommendations were adopted by the House, as the recommendations of other committees are, then there might be some merit in following the course advocated in the hon. member's resolution. But after the Government has adopted its policy and brought down the Estimates it would be inconsistent-notwithstanding any suggestions contained in the English reports-for the Government to change its policy on these expenditures. The Government of the day is responsible to the public for every dollar expended by it and upon the Government must finally rest that responsibility. But if we appoint a committee of the House

then we have a body which is composed of members of the Government of the day and of men who are opposed to it and the responsibility for a policy submitted by them, whether approved of by the country generally or not, must be assumed by the Government of the day. When we have such care exercised in the preparation of the Estimates as I have described, it would be unwise, in my opinion, for this House to appoint any committee which should deal further with those Estimates.
References have been made by the hon. member for Maisonneuve (Mr. Lemieux) and the hon. member for Neepawa (Mr. Davis) in regard to the practice which prevails in Great Britain. That matter was taken up in 1918 by Right Hon. Mr. Samuel in Great Britain, and the replies which he received at that time were in no sense unanimous in regard to the appointment of a select committee for this purpose. Some men were in favour of it, some were opposed to it, some advocated that the question be taken up by the Public Accounts Committee, some advocated that it be dealt with by a single committee called the; Estimates Committee, and others advocated that there should be two committees called Estimates Committees to carry on this work. I merely wish to call the attention of the House to the views of two or three men in Great Britain which certainly should command some weight so far as public opinion is concerned. Right Hon. H. H. Asquith, when he was questioned in regard to this matter said:
There is, no doubt, something to be said for such a Standing Committee on Estimates and Accounts as is suggested, and I should have no objection to seeing the experiment tried. But I am not sanguine that by this or any other new experiment you will 'reduce expenditure, the growth of which (in normal times)-as I have often pointed out-is more due to the House of Commons itself than to ministers and departments.
Right Hon. Reginald McKenna, expressed himself as follows:	-
Parliament can exercise control over policy on which expenditure depends, but parliamentary control over the details of expenditure cannot ever, in my opinion, be effectively exercised. The actual control must always lie with the departments, and all that Parliament can do is to enquire -whether the departments have done their work properly.
Right Hon. Austen Chamberlain made the following statement:
I do not consider that Parliament exercises, or is ever very likely to exercise, an effective control over expenditure. The real control is exercised first within each department by its own officers, secondly by the Treasurer, and

lastly, in case of serious difference of opinion, by the Cabinet.
Parliamentary criticism may be, and occasionally is, useful in suggesting broad lines of enquiry or action. The Committee on Public Accounts is also useful to the Treasury as a "Jorkins," and occasionally as a terror to evildoers. But I am convinced that real and sound economy will only be maintained, if at all, by Government.
Holding these views, I am averse from anything which lessens the responsibility of the Treasury or the Government. The proposed scheme would do both. On the one hand, departments would demand that they should at least be allowed to put their case to the committee, and the Treasury would find it difficult to resist a demand which appears so reasonable.
Another thought that occurs to me is this: Were you to have a small committee, and that small committee practically controlling the expenditure, you present to this country a greater oppor-
5 p.m. tunity for log-rolling than we have at the present time-and I do not use the term in an invidious sense. The people who have interests in regard to the expenditure of the public revenue would be much more able to approach individual members of the committee and impress their views upon them than they would upon members of the House of Commons. I believe it is a safeguard to have these matters left entirely to a committee of the whole House rather than to any special committee that would be appointed. As I have already said I am opposed to the appointment of any special committee because I cannot see any practical benefit which would result from it. Further there would be no finality in the action of the committee, and" the course proposed would only lead to discussion in the House itself on every one of the matters which had been considered by the committee.


Mr. LEMIEUX:: Mr. Speaker-


Mr. DEPUTY SPEAKER:: I must remind the House that the hon. member for Maisonneuve has risen to exercise his right to close the debate. If any hon. member desires to speak upon the resolution he should do so now.


Right Hon.   S@: I did not intend to intervene in this debate, but it has been an interesting one and it certainly has touched a question, the importance of which, I think, is scarcely apparent even to members of the House, and certainly not to the generality of the public. There has not been very much change in the management of our finances between

the times when our entire expenditures amounted to twenty-five, thirty or thirty-five millions of dollars and the present day. A minister who administered a department fifteen or twenty years ago, and again comes to take charge of that department after that lapse of time, finds out how far the department has run away from the old bounds that previously encircled it. In every respect there has been an expansion, and I am very doubtful whether our financial and controlling methods have at all followed along, pari passu, with the expansion and distribution of our expenditures and the consequent responsibility which has come with that expansion and distribution. We have had in the past what we supposed were checks, but to what extent did they so act? First of all there is the Public Accounts Committee. Now you may say, "There you have the representatives of the House of Commons, and before them, with the Auditor General's explanations, calculations and tabulations, all the expenditures of the preceding year may come up and be reviewed." My experience of the Public Accounts Committee has been a very long one, and I have found from that experience that the committee has very seldom set itself down to an absolutely thorough and honest examination of the financial methods of the country. I do not think that under party management of government that committee will ever be able to set itself down to such an exhaustive examination as would give a praiseworthy and resultful outcome. As has been stated, it is in the Public Accounts Committee that you chiefly have something brought to the front upon which an accusation against the Government, or some particular thing in which a member may have a special interest, is fought out, and fought out almost always with a party bias. But my experience of the Public Accounts Committee has not pointed it out to me as a body which has had any very great influence either in blazing a way to a better financial control of our expenditures or in suggesting methods of economy.
I am not at all sure that this committee which my hon. friend has in mind would be much of an improvement upon the Public Accounts Committee, except that it would not be so large, I would hope, and consequently, working along a particular line, might segregate itself almost, if not entirely, from party and devote itself to examination of the questions themselves in their non-partisan aspects. If it could and would do that, it would be an improvement upon the present Public Accounts Committee.
But, after all, would that really result in very much benefit? I am not quite sure what my hon. friend's motion contemplates. Does he mean that after the departments have settled what they think their wants are they shall submit their Estimates to the examination of this committee? If that were done, we can easily see how a certain line of work might be carried out. Or does he mean that after all the departments have put in their Estimates and they have passed through the pruning precess of the Minister of Finance and received the collective approval of the Cabinet, then they shall be submitted to this committee? I imagine that my hon. friend means the latter process.
Let us see exactly what would happen in that case. Those Estimates are scrutinized by a special committee of the House before they are laid on the Table. That would mean that this special commitatee would have to be in session before the House met at all, because if the committee is going to do anything on a set of Estimates involving expenditure over the whole Dominion of hundreds of millions of dollars, it cannot come here one Saturday night and get through that work by the next Saturday night; it is impossible. The members of the committee would not have the antecedent atmosphere out of which arose every one of these Estimates, and they would have to familiarize themselves with it. They would have to go into each department by means of its officers and dig down to the foundations if their examination is to be of any particular benefit. That would take a great deal of time. I doubt if you could get such a committee at work in time after the Estimates were prepared to do the kind of work which my hon. friend wpuld like to see done, and therefore I doubt very much whether that would be practical. All the Estimates Are not ready at the time the House meets; they never have been in my experience. Many of the Estimates are brought down weeks and months later, and in many cases that is unavoidable. The existence of such a committee might tend towards the Estimates being ready earlier than they are under present conditions, but under the best you could do there would be a very large portion of them which would come down later.


Mr. MACKENZIE KING:: May I ask my right hon. friend if his objection would be met by altering the resolution to make it read " the Estimates of the various de-

partments should, after being laid on the Table, but before being discussed, be scrutinized by a special committee/' and so on? That I think is what my hon. friend meant.


Sir GEORGE  POSTER@: I do not think so, because the amount of work which would be put before a body of men who had not had the initiation of the expenditures before them, in other words, had not in any way the atmosphere of the various departments, would leave them like travellers in an unknown country. They would have to understand its layout before they could get at the bottom of the information which would really be necessary for them to have in their examination if they were to come to any useful conclusion. And if you put that work off still later, until the Estimates are laid on the table of the House, then they would have all the less time to do this. I do not believe we are going to get the desired improvement by a committee of that kind. But that there is an imperative need for some different methods, and different methods from those we have followed in the past, I believe is absolutely certain, and in some way or other I hope that the Government and the House will be able to get down to an examination of the matter with a view to finding those inproved (methods.
Now, there are some means of accomplishing that purpose, and in two or three minutes I will give the view which I have in reference *to it. I think one of the weak points in the administration and control of our finances is that every team drives its own way-each department sees its peculiar needs and gets its Estimates fashioned on the basis of those needs, and those are their Estimates. Those Estimates have to come before the Minister of Finance and later before the Cabinet. And why? In order that there may be correlation of all the expenses in regard to the amount which it is useful to expend as a whole, and consequently the relationship between the expenditures of the different department must be taken into account. One thing that happens is this: After those Estimates are reviewed and appropriations are made every department drives on for the rest of the year entirely by itself; there is no financial supervision as a whole. But there ought to be. To my mind the Minister of Finance, who is to see that proper Estimates are made, must by some method or other follow the expenditures in every department by the year, so that when the time comes for him to use his judgment as to the relative amounts of these expen-

ditures he may have the atmosphere of the different departments and experience of their workings. So that some way or other we ought to have financial control over the expenditures of all the departments. I do not mean despotic control although sometimes it might be despotic.
What I mean is the control of consultation and advice:-how are you getting along with this expenditure-is it possible to retrench in this respect or the other?- as you find it now, is it necessary that such an expenditure should be carried to its fulfilment? The idea would be to have some permanently constituted body, always on the watch, always supervising, always storing up the experience of the year to be applied in the consideration of proposed expenditures in each of the departments during the succeeding year. That correlating supervisory power is something which I think we need, and I am sure no one feels the need of it more than the Finance Minister himself. No individual person can do that by himself. He, the minister, must have the machinery with which it may be carried on, himself as the controlling power.
I agree with my hon. friend the Finance Minister (Sir Henry Drayton) that while we make a great deal of fuss about what our auditor does, about the Auditor General's report and things like that, our audit falls down because it is not a preaudit. After the whole thing has been completed, after advances or expenditures have been made, the matter comes before the Auditor General. You cannot have the needed amount of caution and of care on the part of an expending officer if he feels that he can get the expenditure through before the Auditor General gets his hands upon it. The audit ought to be there before the amount is paid out, and it is quite possible to do that. It will require some work, some organization, some help, but it can be done; and there, I believe, is one of the very best checks we can possibly have -a sound and thorough pre-audit system.
The next bit of machinery for the keeping down of expenses and the production of economy is the Committee of the Whole House in Supply. As all who have studied the question know, the last body in the world to take hold of the finances of the country is a House of Commons divided on party lines, sweating out the later days of its sessional existence, over millions upon millions of expenditure, an insight into which the members cannot possibly have.

Any man can take up a particular item, work it out and become master of it, but it is a different matter to get a grasp of the whole expenditure, a knowledge of how one item of expenditure relates to the other and how it all works out in the aggregate. Our fifty-odd years of experience in parliamentary life has proved to us that that cannot be done in Committee of Supply.
Now, I have added to the difficulties and have not done much in the way of throwing light on the subject. I do not want to take up the time of the House at any greater length. What my hon. friend has in view is absolutely a correct thing to have in view, though he will scarcely attain his object through the means of the suggested committee. There are methods, I believe, which we could arrive at if we could settle ourselves down to calm investigation- maybe it would be the method of a committee of some kind-with a view to establishing what is needed now more than ever before, the very Closest supervision, first upon the estimating itself,-then upon the revision of the Estimates, then continuously upon the expenditures even after Parliament has given vitality to the Estimates and made them effective. My hon. friend will not feel that I am opposing his view. I am in entire accord with the views that have been expressed in this committee today. I feel that what little we have said about it this afternoon has accomplished already a good purpose and will have fruit in the future, but I am scarcely of the opinion that the committee which my hon. friend has proposed would in the end be productive of very much good.


William Lyon Mackenzie King: Mr. Speaker, I had not intended to take part in this debate; I regret that it was not possible for me to be in the House during most of the discussion. But it seems to me that my right hon. friend (Sir George Foster) has just presented a strong argument for the motion which is before the House. If I gather rightly, his introductory remark was that a committee of this kind would not have the atmosphere, so to speak, of the different departments which would be essential to its becoming acquainted with their various needs, and that it might therefore, be difficult for the committee to decide what was necessary. But admitting that to be the .case, is it not still more difficult for the House of Commons as a body to get the atmosphere to which my right hon. friend has referred? A small committee could
bring before it the deputy heads and other officers of the different departments and question them in regard to the various items going to make up the Estimates. The required atmosphere would very much more quickly be obtained in this way and the committee would be in a position to say what items should be allowed to pass without consideration and what items had better be reserved for the consideration of the House later.
My right hon. friend in his concluding remarks made an assertion with which we all agree: that nothing could be worse in connection with the consideration of the country's finances than the exhibition we have in this House at the end of the session when millions of dollars are voted in the early morning hours, nobody being in a position to give to the Estimates thus passed that careful thought, attention, supervision and scrutiny which should be applied to the proposed expenditures. It is precisely to meet and to avoid a situation of that kind that the hon. member for Maisonneuve (Mr. Lemieux) suggests in his motion that a joint committee composed of members on both sides should have an opportunity during the session to go over all the Estimates carefully, ascertain what items are non-contentious, allow these to be put to one side, and reserve for the consideration of the House only such items as are likely to be debatable or subject to question. If we admit that when we have the Estimates as a whole placed before us it is difficult for Parliament to deal with them intelligently, we must concede that if a committee acting as suggested should have supervision over the Estimates, there would be, in the end, a closer scrutiny and more effective supervision of the public expenditures. This is what my hon. friend has in mind, I think, in his motion, and as his suggestion would seem to lead to economy of the time of the House and consequently of expenditure, the motion would seem to have everything to commend it. Of course I recognize that this discussion is more for the purpose of bringing out the merits of the different suggestions than anything else, and I would not like to urge that the resolution be pressed to a division. But I do think that the remarks made this afternoon have shown the necessity of transferring, if possible, to some smaller body the consideration of the Estimates as a whole with a view to the eliminating of non-contentious items and the reserving for consideration of the House of such items as are likely to give rise to serious discussion.


Rodolphe Lemieux: Mr. Speaker-


Edgar Nelson Rhodes: I must draw the attention of the House to the circumstance that when the mover of the resolution makes his reply the debate will be closed.


Rodolphe Lemieux: Mr. Speaker, I am
very grateful to members on both sides for their kind attention and for their collaboration in an effort to bring down the public expenditure by such method as may be deemed advisable to the attainment of that worthy object. When I have such figures as those I will quote, before me, I cannot help impressing on both sides of the House the necessity of finding a means of practising real economy. Here are three or four startling figures which should arrest the attention of the House. Look at the serious situation in which the country finds itself to-day. In 1914, the expenditure per head of population was $24.11; in 1920 it was $75.01. In 1914, the gross debt of Canada per head was $71.75, whilst in 1920 it has reached the colossal figure of $334.90. In 1914, the net debt per head was $43.49, whereas it has now reached the enormous figure of $215. Therefore, it is not with any party bias,-I need not repeat this-that I brought forward this motion this afternoon. I wish, after twenty-five years of service in Parliament, to do something for my country, at this particular juncture, and if possible, relieve, even in the least possible way, the burden that is now borne by the taxpayers. I am told by the hon. member for Calgary West (Mr. Tweedie) and, I believe, by the Minister of Finance (Sir Henry Drayton) that if my motion was adopted, the principle of ministerial responsibility would be affected. I stated a moment ago that the committee presided over by an ex-minister in Great Britain, the Hon. Sir Herbert Samuel, contemplated that objection and answered it. In England, where we have a matter-of-fact electorate, where there is a sense of government ingrained in the representatives of the people, the parliamentary institutions of the land have been, to use the words of Tennyson "broadening down from precedent to precedent." Many things which were found objectionable a century or two centuries ago have come to pass, and to-day they are accepted as a matter of course. Sir Herbert Samuel in his report said: Why should we consider as a vote of want of confidence a motion made to reduce any expenditure after a report has been made by an independent committee of members 
of the House who have scrutinized and investigated all the Estimates. He added: If it were understood that it would not be considered as a want of confidence motion, it would become a matter of course. It would not affect the policy of the Government, because the committee would not look after the policy of the Government, but would simply make suggestions towards economy.
This is a change which must take place. It has been suggested in England where the principle of ministerial responsibility has been recognized from time immemorial. Why? Because the hour has come to make the break between the past and the future. They want to seize their golden opportunity of ploughing new furrows, because this is a period of reconstruction after the greatest of all wars and because expenditure has been so enormous that it threatens the very life of the nation. We also have to strike new ground; we also have to face stupendous difficulties, and though it may look revolutionary, yet we must adapt ourselves to such drastic procedure as will help the very function of Government. I have much sympathy with the Government. Any Government is, under present circumstances, deserving of the sympathy of Parliament and of the people, because Canada for the next twenty-five years will have very serious financial difficulties to contend with. I wish in all sincerity to help the Government of to-day as well as the Government of to-morrow, the ministers of to-day as well as the ministers of to-morrow in their arduous task. The more checks you have against ill-advised or hasty expenditure, the better will it be for the country.
In the United States they have taken heed of the advice of that committee of British statesmen. Mr. Taft not long ago used these words:
We want economy and efficiency, we want saving, and saving for a purpose. We want to save money to enable the Government to go into some of the beneficial projects which we are debarred from taking up because we cannot increase our expenditures.
And further:
Instead of seeking to control administration through depriving it of the exercise of discretion in the transaction of public business, the recommendation of the Commission is that Congress shall definitely assign the duties which come properly within the scope of administrative responsibility and then shall prescribe such conditions and require such an accounting as will disclose promptly and accurately the results of the exercise of the executive's discretion or indiscretion. By so doing not only will the executive have brought home to him the need

for giving careful attention to every act as a matter of self-protection, but also every member of Congress and every agency of publicity may become a potent factor in bringing the service up to a high state of efficiency.
This was said by Mr. Taft after the first committee was appointed in England in 1912. But what has happened since? Uncle Sam has watched closely and has borrowed quietly from Great Britain this new system of controlling national expenditure. I find that, after the thirteen reports were filed by Sir Herbert Samuel's Committee on Estimates in England: Congressman Medill McCormick introduced in the House of Representatives in March, 1918, a series of Bills and resolutions providing for a budget system of finance, a single Budget Committee to be set up which shall report the Estimates, with proposals for revenue legislation, to the House in the form of a single Bill, a single committee to examine the departmental accounts, and an Auditor General to work in conjunction. Commenting on this new mode of American procedure in Congress Mr. Davenport said:
If America can improve its financial system in time of war it is not for Great Britain to lag behind in the period of reconstruction.
And I may add that it is not for Canada either to lag behind. The hon. member for Red Deer (Mr. Clark) said a moment ago that last year, because of the enlightenment of public opinion in Great Britain, a public opinion which we should emulate in Canada, the Mother Country reduced her expenditure by $2,000,000,000. When I was in England last year three or four byelections were held and the candidates ran on the "anti-waste" programme. There is real public opinion in England. I am sorry to say that in this country we have not the same keenness as regards national expenditure, because the public, as the Minister of Trade and Commerce (Sir George Foster) said a moment ago, is kept in the dark; it does not know the highways and byways leading to the Treasury, the Auditor General's office, the principal officials in the departments, and the public which seldom reads a blue book is suddenly seized with' the Budget, with enormous figures to face.
This committee, Sir, in the judgment of the most experienced men in the British Parliament is a necessary institution. It would be, I grant, somewhat of a peaceful revolution to introduce into our system here, but if it has been done in England during the war, if it is a British institution to stay, why not adopt it in Canada. Let
us realize that we are placed in an especially difficult situation, and that a drastic reform is needed. I shall not take up more of the time of the House except to thank hon. members on both sides for their contributions to the debate, and to express the hope that my hon. friend the Minister of Finance will accept, if not my advice, at least that of the right hon. gentleman who is the Nestor of this House, the Minister of Trade and Commerce (Sir George Foster), and put as many checks as possible on the ill-advised and hasty expenditures which even officials in departments are quite able to favour at times.
Motion withdrawn.


MONTREAL AND SOUTH SHORE TRAFFIC
Mr. JOSEPH ARCHAMBAULT (Cham-bly and Vercheres) moved:: That, in the opinion of this House, in view of the considerable development of Montreal and the south shore opposite Montreal, and of the evident insufficiency of the Victoria Bridge a new bridge should immediately be constructed connecting Montreal with the south shore.
Mr. Speaker, rising to speak in support of this resolution regarding the necessity for the construction of a new bridge between Montreal and the south shore, I realize, particularly after the discussion that has just taken place this afternoon in reference to the enormous expenditure in Canada, that all the arguments I may put forward and any sympathy I may win from hon. members will be met by the plea of the necessity for strict economy at the present moment. Nevertheless, I think I shall be able to convince the Government and the House of the absolute necessity for the construction of such a bridge. Furthermore, I think I shall be able to convince the House that I am asking, not for an ordinary expenditure, but rather an investment by the Government that will yield a return for the benefit of the people. Mr. Speaker, there exists such a thing as false economy, unbusinesslike and detrimental economy, which makes a person poorer. There are cases where a business man, although hard pressed and bound to curtail expenses, feels that even if he has to borrow the necessary money, he must make a certain expenditure which will bring him a profit in the end. I am confident that the building of a second bridge between Montreal and the south shore is an investment in that category.

First, let us examine the question of the absolute necessity for the construction of such a bridge. There exists at the present time between the city of Montreal and the south shore only one bridge, which is called the Victoria Jubilee bridge. The Hon. John Young first had the idea, in 1847, of building such a bridge. In 1852 Sir John Young succeeded in convincing some English capitalists, and in 1853 two engineers, Messrs. A. M. Ross and Robert Stephenson, came to Canada to construct the bridge.
The corner-stone of the first pier was placed'on July 22,1854, by Sir C. P. Roney, first secretary of the Grand Trunk Railway, accompanied by Benjamin Holmes, first vice-president, James Hodge, contractor, and A. M. Ross. The contractors had hopes of terminating their contract in the specified time, but they encountered many difficulties, such as an accident resulting in the death of twelve men, but the most disastrous one was when the ice flood that winter carried away the whole construction. Nevertheless, the bridge was completed after six years, instead of five, and on December 24, 1859, the first train crossed the bridge with Vice-President Holmes, Sir George Etienne Cartier, Messrs. James Hodge, A. M. Ross, W. Shanly, McPherson, Forsythe and others. The last stone and the last bolt were placed by the young Prince of Wales, later His Majesty King Edward VII. A banquet was given to commemorate the event, at which the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Newcastle were the guests of honour. A gold medal was offered to His Majesty and bronze ones to the officials of the Grand Trunk Railway. The bridge had a length of 9,184 feet, twenty-three spans of 242 feet each, the centre one being 330 feet long. The construction of that bridge was the cause of a great boom in the development of Montreal and the south shore, to such an extent, that soon new constructions had to be made, and the dark passage was replaced by the present frame work. A double track was built, as well as a roadway for vehicles and pedestrians. This new work was ready for * the traffic on September 13, 1898. It had been constructed under the supervision of Mr. Joseph Hobson. The weight of the new bridge was 20,000 tons, the old one being 9,044 tons. The width was extended from 160 to 166 feet, and the height from 18 to 60 feet. No other work has been done since then to enlarge the bridge, and keep it abreast with the tremendous expansion and development of Montreal; on the contrary, [Mr. Lemieux.l
the bridge traffic facilities were considerably reduced when, in 1909, the former roadway on the north for pedestrians and vehicles was utilized for electric tramway purposes.
I have thought fit to outline briefly the history of the present bridge from notes I have taken from Dr. Atherton's book on the history of Montreal, in order to impress on your mind, Mr. Speaker, and on the minds of the Government, that this bridge which, as I have said, was built seventy years ago, and repaired twenty years ago, and which, instead of being enlarged in 1909 had its traffic facilities for pedestrians and vehicles curtailed, has not kept pace with the tremendous development of the city of Montreal. It would be idle for me to take up much time of the House in an attempt to show that the Victoria bridge is n ow entirely inadequate for the purpose for which it was built. This bridge is the main artery -in fact, it is the only artery-between the south shore and the city of Montreal, and all of the traffic, coming not only from the United States and across from the south shore, but also from the Maritime Provinces, has to cross the St. Lawrence over it. The American railways do not risk sending their heavier locomotives across this bridge because they suspect its strength. The Victoria bridge, Mr. Speaker, is the only roadway to Montreal for vehicles, and the accommodation for such at present consists of a narrow path of about thirteen and a quarter feet wide, a source of inconvenience and grave danger. I am told that, on an average, between seven hundred and twelve hundred vehicles cross this bridge every day on that narrow roadway. The district in the vicinity of the Bridge, comprising the counties of St. John, Chambly, Vercheres, Laprairie, Napierville, and even Richelieu, is a very fertile one, and the farmers, who produce a great deal, have to cross that bridge to take their produce to market in Montreal; while the merchants in the city have to make use of this narrow roadway to deliver their goods to residents of the south shore. There is a very large population on the south shore who work in Montreal and have to cross the bridge twice a day, and I wish some member of this House had an opportunity to cross on that narrow roadway in a motor car. If" he perchance met a truck or a load of hay on the way, he would soon appreciate the situation. I have had occasion to cross the bridge quite often, because

the south shore opposite Montreal is in the constituency I represent, and every time I have made the trip I have met either a truck, a load of hay, or some other traffic, and have had to practically stop to avoid collision. In daylight it is possible to cross, but at night one can do so only at the risk of great danger. Under existing conditions the bridge is a menace to human life.


Rodolphe Lemieux: That is true.


Joseph Archambault: To prove this assertion I need only state that last year, during a period of ten months, two fatal accidents occurred. On both occasions a farmer coming back from Montreal after having sold his produce had the misfortune to meet a motor car, which struck his rig hurling him -over the railing of the bridge, and he was drowned. And as I said before, the utmost care is necessary in crossing the bridge if one is to avoid accident. Furthermore, if a mishap should happen, such as a fire, to render the bridge impassable, Montreal would be completely isolated from the south shore.
It is true we have a ferry plying from Montreal to the south shore, but during at least three months of the year that ferry cannot cross. The same may be said of the ice bridge in the winter. So that this bridge is the only means of communication between the south shore and Montreal. We had a disastrous fire in August last year which made impassable one-third of the roadway on the bridge. The tramway and railway tracks were untouched, but the roadway was damaged; and to show what damage this small fire did to the city of Montreal, I might say that on August 21 there was a string of a mile and a quarter of automobiles which had to wait fourteen hours to get over to the metropolis. The farmers of the south shore could not get over with their produce, or go back to their farms, and prices rose from fifty to one hundred and fifty per cent on these three days when the Victoria bridge was closed to the traffic. It is doubtful whether a similar condition exists anywhere else in the world in connection with a city fronting on a river as the city of Montreal does. The inadequacy of this bridge has been a hindrance to the development not only of Montreal but of the south shore. If you have observed, Mr. Speaker, in connection with practically all the large cities in the world that front on rivers-I need mention only Brooklyn,
opposite New York, Cambridge opposite Boston, Minneapolis opposite St. Paul, the city of East St. Louis opposite St. Louis, and, in England, the city of Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool-the development of the cities opposite the larger centres has always been due to communication between the two by means of bridges.
I said at the outset that this matter was one not only of local but of national interest-I probably would not have brought this matter before the House, had it been only a matter of local interest. But there is the important tourist traffic to be considered. That traffic, on account of the development in motor vehicles, has recently increased by leaps and bounds and has brought millions of dollars every year not only to the district of Montreal but to the country at large. The tourist traffic coming from the United States to the city of Montreal, owing to the good roads policy inaugurated by the Provincial Government, and particularly because of the fact that the King Edward route, which runs directly from the United States border, passes right in front of the city, is increasing every summer. If a new bridge were built which could take care of the farmers' traffic and that of the residents of the south shore, and also the tourist traffic coming from the United States, it would be a great boon to that particular district and to the country as a whole.
At Six o'clock the House took recess.
After Recess
The House resumed at Eight o'clock.


Joseph Archambault: Mr. Speaker, before recess I was endeavouring to demonstrate to the House and to the Government that the construction of a bridge between the city of Montreal and the south shore is not only of local but of national interest, and I had pointed out the large amount of money that the increased American traffic would bring to the city of Montreal and neighbourhood and to the country at large. But I wish to state that this construction has also another national aspect. With the tremendous task confronting us of putting the Government-owned railways on a paying basis it is the duty of hon. members to try and find every means that will contribute to that end. While discussion was going on in the Montreal papers at the time of the accident to which I referred-the Victoria Bridge fire

of last summer-many suggestions were made, and one struck me as being eminently practical and worthy of adoption. It was made by a well known engineer, Mr. Ernest Drinkwater, engineer of St. Lambert. He argued that the new bridge could be the means of connecting the two parts of the Canadian National railways-the Intercolonial on the south shore and the Canadian Northern on the Montreal side. He said:
The Canadian Northern section from Mount Royal tunnel can pass over this new bridge and join up with the Intercolonial system, also the Grand Trunk-Portland line, the Central Vermont, and the Delaware and Hudson, would reach the business section of the City of Montreal and save a distance of from five to seven miles. What a wonderful economic saving of time to the thousands who use these trains, and what a wonderful saving in rolling stock and track maintenance.
The same gentleman also said:
That further economic saving would occur, resulting immediately in lowering delivery charges for produce to the city of Montreal, because it would cut off half the distance to the Bonsecours market. On the new bridge there would be two or three double vehicular tracks with sidewalks and sufficient railway accommodation. Among the engineering possibilities is the elimination of all the level crossings on the Grand Trunk from St. Henri to the Bonaventure station by paralleling the Canadian Pacific rail-wa/ and establishing a union terminal station in the McGill, Notre Dame and Hay-market district, connecting with the overhead right of way from the Mount Royal tunnel. This latter means a tremendous saving to the Canadian Government railways with a through line across the river. The National Transcontinental and Canadian Northern would therefore have access to the United States without having to go to the Quebec bridge and come back to St. Hya-cinthe some 250 miles, and I have no doubt that the saving to the Governmentt railways alone would go a long way towards payment of the cost of the bridge.
Sir, the construction of this bridge is not a new idea; it has been talked of for the past forty years. The Hon. Mr. Prefon-taine, a member of the Laurier administration, was an enthusiastic supporter of the project. A man of unusual initiative, a patriot, he saw a great future in the development of the district of Montreal, especially by the construction of this bridge. Unfortunately Mr. Prefontaine died suddenly. After his death the project was favourably entertained by the Laurier administration, and if I am not mistaken my hon. friend the Minister of Marine and Fisheries (Mr. Ballantyne), who was at that time a member of the Harbour Commission of Montreal, was also in favour of its construction. Another government came into power in 1911, and my information is that my predecessor in the representation of 
Chambly-Vercheres, Mr. Rainville, was also a supporter of the project, and that he succeeded in inducing the Government to take it up. I understand that afterwards plans for a bridge were prepared by Mr. J. W. Cowie, engineer of the Montreal Harbour Commission, and that these plans are still in the possession of the Department of Public Works here. Orders were given to the Harbour Commissioners to go ahead, but the war intervened and of course the project had to be abandoned. Since I have had the honour of representing the county of Cbambly and Vercheres in this House I have been incessantly asking the successive Ministers of Public Works to again bring this matter before the Cabinet with a view to the construction of the bridge.
I had several interviews with Hon. Mr. Carvell, with the date Right Hon. Mr. Sifton, and I have also seen the present Minister of Public Works (Mr' McCurdy), the Minister of Railways (Mr. Reid) and the Minister of Marine (Mr. Ballantyne), but all my interviews were fruitless.
On January 13, 1919, the municipalities of the south shore held a largely attended convention at the Longueuil city hall under the chairmanship of Mr. Alexander Thur-ber, mayor of Longueuil, an untiring and devoted supporter of the project for years. That convention unanimously passed a resolution praying the Government to go on with the project not only because it would be in the interest of the south shore and the country at large, but also because it would provide work for many returned soldiers and former munition workers. In Montreal the project has been endorsed by the city of Montreal, th.e Montreal Board of Trade, the city of Outremont, the Union of Municipalities, the Chambre de Commerce, the Canadian Manufacturers' Association, the South Shore Board of Trade and the Automobile Club of Canada. It has also the endorsation of all the prominent business men in Montreal.
A committee was formed of representative bodies, and they first interviewed the Harbour Commissioners. At that meeting were present Mr. W. G. Ross, of the Harbour Commission; Farquhar Robertson, Brigadier-General A. E. Labelle, M. P. Fennell and F. W. Cowie. Other representatives were Mr. W. B. Ramsay, George Sumner, President of the Board of Trade; Joseph Quintal, for the Chambre de Commerce; F. A. Covert, J. Douglas, J. P. Hudson, Norman Dawes, Mayor Jos. Beaubien, of Outremont, and Mayor Gordon of St. Lambert. They then interviewed the chairman of the administrative commission in Montreal, Mr. APRIL 18, 1921
E. R. Decary, who gave his entire support to the project. Finally they had an interview with the Premier of Quebec. On that occasion the delegation was composed of Lord Shaughnessy, Mr. W. B. Ramsay, Sir Charles Gordon, Sir Lamer Gouin, Hon. George Simard, Colonel Hutchison, A. M. Irvine, Hon. Achille Bergevin, E. R. Decary, R. A. Ross and Mr. W. G. Ross. I may be allowed to read what Lord Shaughnessy said in presenting the delegation:
"We are a group of citizens of Montreal who have been impressed with the vital necessity of securing better communication between the city of Montreal and the shore on the south of the St. Lawrence. At present the only way of crossing the St. Lawrence, as far as vehicular traffic is concerned, is the narrow roadway on Victoria bridge, which is a source of great inconvenience and even danger. It is so narrow that accidents have occurred, and there is always ground for apprehension of further accidents. Then, too, on th-is island of Montreal we are rapidly approaching the time when we will have a population of one million people, who will have no means of getting to the other side except from the one end of the island. Then on the other side of the river are farmers who bring their products to the city in increasing quantities every year. Beyond that, and of wider importance is the important fact that with the advent of the motor car, there is room for a tremendous interchange of travel between this part of Canada and the counties to the south, the province generally, and more particularly with the United States.
"We all know," continued Lord Shaughnessy, "what that tourist travel means. We have had experience of it, and Sir Lomer Gouin knows what it is in Quebec. I recollect the time when the receipts at the St. Louis hotel at Quebec did not exceed one hundred or 128,000 dollars a year, and my recollection is that the Chateau Frontenac has received in one year something in the vicinity of two million dollars, and an infinitely larger sum has been spent in the oity of Quebec with the citizens there.
"We have no one plan or project to place before you at this moment," added Lord Shaughnessy. "I do not know that any studies of any engineering character have yet -been made, or that the element of location, cost or the character of the structure have been considered. But in our opinion it should be a bridge, and from every standpoint it is important to have a bridge that would not only carry vehicular traffic, but the tramways as well."
Mr. Decary also spoke. Sir Lomer Gouin emphasized the fact that the bridge was not only of civic and provincial but of international importance as a very important link between Canada and the United States, and that the matter therefore "directly affected the federal Parliament". The Premier of Quebec expressed his sympathy with the project and promised that the proposal would be fully considered by the Government. This is the promise usually made by ministers, but I understand that the Premier of Quebec is in
entire sympathy with the project and has decided to co-operated with the federal Government and with the different municipalities interested in any action taken.
I might also add, Mr. Speaker, that at a meeting held at St. Lambert about a year and a half ago the present Prime Minister (Mr. Meighen) delivered an address in which he expressed sympathy for the project and appreciation of the fact that it would be of tremendous advantage to the population in the district of Montreal and vicinity. He pointed out that the expenditures incurred in connection with the war were too great to admit of any action at that time but expressed the hope that at some future time the federal Government would be able to come to the aid of the municipalities and the district of Montreal in connection with the project.
I said at the beginning of my remarks that the support of the Government to this enterprise would be more in the nature of a productive investment than of an ordinary expenditure. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the construction of the bridge would bring millions of dollars of tourist money into Canada and also greatly benefit the Canadian National railways and lessen unemployment* you will notice that my resolution does not ask for the expenditure of any money; I am simply asking Parliament to state that in its opinion such a bridge should be built. What I am pleading for is the support of the Government to the project. There is a plan, admitted to be the best, that the bridge be built by the Harbour Commission with funds secured through the Government, provision to be made for such tolls as would enable the Commission to meet the cost of upkeep, interest and sinking fund requirements, aside from such direct assistance as the Dominion and provincial governments, the city of Montreal and other municipalities may afford. I simply wish the House to express its approval of the project. I will refrain, Mr. Speaker, from mentioning any items in the Estimates now before us for consideration which in my opinion are not as necessary expenditures as the financial assistance which would be involved in the construction of such a bridge.
Another-reason-and it will be my last, because I have taken enough of the time of the House on this subject-is this: everyone is aware that many returned soldiers and other deserving citizens are at present without employment. There is what I may

call a labour crisis and in order to provide work for the unemployed I can think of no better enterprise than the construction of the bridge. Therefore, on account of the absolute necessity for the construction of this bridge, the large development that has taken place in the city of Montreal and its neighbourhood, requiring better facilities for communication between the south shore and the city, the increased tourist's money that improved means of communication between Montreal and the south shore will bring, not only to the metropolis but to the people of Canada at large, the work that this project will provide for the unemployed, as well as On account of the dangerous situation resulting from the present condition of the Victoria bridge and the threatened isolation of the city should another accident happen, I sincerely hope that the Government will accept my resolution.


Mr. ROCH LANCTOT (Laprairie-Napierville):: (Translation.) Mr. Speaker, I congratulate my hon. friend of Chambly-Vercheres (Mr. Archambault) on having placed in the Orders of the Day, a resolution which reads as follows:
That, in the opinion of this House, in view of the considerable development of Montreal and the south shore opposite Montreal, anj of the evident insufficiency of the Victoria bridge, a new bridge should immediately be constructed connecting Montreal with the south shore.
When the Victoria bridge was rebuilt in 1899, the Grand Trunk railway had provided two roads for vehicles, one on the north side and the other on the south side. Everything went on smoothly till 1911. In 1911, the United Counties Electric Railway took the north side, and from then on, there was but one road on the south side opened to vehicles. I am at a loss to understand why the Grand Trunk Railway, which had made arrangements with St. Lambert and all that part of the south shore, having given a side of the road for the electric tramways, did not endeavour to replace the road which they had taken from us, and if possible, build two on the south side. There is only one road left open for our enormous traffic which has developed, especially since the building of the King-Edward VII boulevard.
It is my opinion that the traffic is now twenty times greater than it was when the tramways took possession of the road on the north side.
You must be aware Mr. Speaker, that the county which I have the honour to represent in the House, has certainly been

the most unfortunate one since there is only one side of the road left for vehicles. Allow me to draw jour attention to a few accidents and deaths within the last ten months:
Emile Rousseau, together with Alphonse Marcile of St. Michel Archange de Napier-ville, were precipitated into the St. Lawrence river on December 22, 1919. This happened towards six o'clock in the evening. These young men were on their way back from Montreal where they had gone and sold their farm products, when along came joy-riding automobiles at a speed of some 50 miles an hour, the drivers of which were probably a little the worse for drinks, and the two unfortunate victims were thrown into the St. Lawrence. When a death occurs in a household, it is a misfortune, a hardship, for the family; but in this instance, when the families had to wait weeks and months before the bodies could be recovered, you will admit Mr. Speaker, that these families were to be pitied indeed. A
Now, even should the construction of a new bridge be decided upon by the House, it would be a long while before it could be built. In the meantime, the Government who are now or will soon be in possession of the Grand Trunk, should without delay see to it that the part of the road for the vehicles be broadened if possible, so as to do away with accidents. As I said at the beginning of my remarks, when in the past we had two roads for vehicles there were no accidents, no loss of life. I repeat that it is most important that we be given two roads. If ever the Government can be justified in spending a few hundred thousand dollars, it surely must be whep this is done to avoid accidents and to protect the lives of the people. This is not a matter of public works in view of elections, but its object is of preventing further accidents and further loss of life.
This question is not a new one. I remember that during an election in Chateau-guay in 1913, the then Minister of Public Works, the hon. Robert Rogers, had promised the electors that he would see to it that a road for vehicles be provided on the bridge between Caughnawaga and Lachine. The plan for this road extension was published in all the Government papers of the day. I am of the opinion that this was somewhat with a view to securing the election of the Government candidate, at any rate nothing has been heard of the matter since. The Chateauguay farmers thought themselves the richer by some

hundred thousands of dollars for that promise. They must have felt some disappointment in hearing nothing further of the matter.
It would also be very easy to build a bridge in my county at St. Catherine's hill (which is not far from Verdun) over Heron's Island, for the river is shallow at this point. According to the boatmen of St. Catherine, there is rock every where and there is but three to five feet of water in the channel which is 500 feet wide. There is hardly any navigation at this point, which is about twelve miles from the Victoria bridge. This would greatly benefit the counties of Ohateauguay, Huntingdon, La-prairie and Beauharnois, and all that part of the south shore. Beside, as early as next fall, the macadamized Dundee road will be finished, and this road will surely turn away three-quarters of the traffic which now comes from the state of New York by King-Edward VII boulevard, and the traffic could utilize this bridge to Montreal. In a few years, when this bridge is built, Verdun, Lachine, and indeed the whole city of Montreal, which will have grown to fhat point by that time, will give this bridge as much traffic as there is now over the Victoria bridge.
I only casually mention this, for I am almost sure that the present Government will not build my bridge any more than that of the hon. member for Cbambly-Vercheres; but before very long the present Government shall have made room for another Government, I have all reasons to believe. As I am constantly preaching economy, the Government papers may tomorrow hold be up for asking for the building of a bridge. I know better; I am not asking for such a bridge. I only say that when the finances are in a better shape the Government might perhaps help us. As to the project of the hon. member for Chambly-Vecheres, I do not oppose it. He is not asking the Government for money, he just stated so.
It is the duty of the Government to determine whether or not that is a paying venture. I have no objection to there being a bridge erected at that place, if the country were to benefit by it. As for mine, I do not ask for it now. I am simply making a survey. When in power, we shall build a bridge; the treasury will perhaps be in a better condition then, and I shall ask for the erection of a bridge. I need not say any more; like my hon. friend from Chambly-Vercheres, I accept the Government's answer.


Hon. F. B. McCURDY (Minister of Public Works) :: As the hon. member for Chambly and Vercheres (Mr. Archam-bault) has correctly pointed out, the proposal for a bridge, in addition to the Victoria bridge, to connect the city of Montreal with the south shore is not a new one. It is certainly more than half as old as either he or I.
All who have listened to the two speakers who have championed the provision of a bridge in this location will doubtless admit the necessity for additional means of communication between Montreal and the south shore, whether it be another bridge as called for in the resolution of my hon. friend from Chambly and Vercheres (Mr. Archambault) or the increasing of the carrying capacity of the Victoria bridge as suggested by my hon. friend from Laprairie and Napierville (Mr. Lanctot).
But, admitting the necessity for such construction, I would suggest that the attention of the parties who are desirous of having these improvements carried out should really be directed towards the competent authorities, who should assume the expenditure. The building of the Victoria bridge, which bridge has done such excellent service in accommodating the traffic that is now apparently crowding it to overflowing, was shouldered by the Grand Trunk railway. As members of the House doubtless know, that bridge was erected in the first instance, at a very . large cost, at the expense of the Grand Trunk Railway Company, although subsequently, some twenty years ago, aid was given through the medium of railway subsidies voted by this Parliament to the extent of half a million dollars. For some considerable time past there has existed an agitation for the building of a second bridge, and, not unnaturally, this agitation has in part been directed towards Ottawa. Thirty odd years ago a company was incorporated for the purpose of building a tunnel to connect the island of Montreal with the south shore; some ten years later another company was incorporated to build a bridge. From that time on, as was natural, the agitation flourished, and it was not surprising that Mr. J. H. Rainville, the predecessor of the present member for Chambly and Vercheres, brought the matter to the attention of the government of the day with the result that, in 1912, two well known engineers, Messrs. Henry Holgate and Arthur Surveyer, were appointed as ' a committee to investigate the respective merits of these two schemes and to report

their finding. Their report states that either scheme is feasible and, by inference, that both simultaneously constructed would not be commercially practicable. The engineers found, however, that the plans of both these companies were not sufficiently concrete to warrant an absolute finding.
The matter therefore went along until 1919, when the Montreal Central Terminal Company again urged very strongly that aid should be given that company towards the execution of their plan. I have no personal knowledge of the matter, but I find, on referring to the records of the Public Works Department, that the minister of that department in 1919 called a conference of all parties interested in the prospective construction of additional transportation facilities connecting Montreal with the south shore. This conference, comprised some twenty men, including the presidents of all transportation companies affected, the mayor of Montreal, and others were invited to attend. The report of that conference states that the consensus of opinion of those present at the hearing was practically in favour of a surface crossing instead of a tunnel. Mr. Verville, representing the city of Montreal, so the report narrates, stated that his instructions were to oppose the application, and urged that a careful study, embracing all questions respecting transportation, terminals, and railway connections, relating to the city of Montreal, should be made before granting approval to any tunnel project.
No action has been taken by the present Government, and I might say that while I followed the argument of the member for Chambly and Vercheres (Mr. Archambault) and did not dissent from his conclusion as to the necessity for additional transportation facilities, I expected him to enlarge his argument, to the conclusion that the Federal Government would be responsible for works of this character. I must admit, in the absence of such argument, and knowing my hon. friend to be a good constitutional lawyer, that the only natural conclusion is that constitutional liability does not exist.
This, after all, is a matter of great but of local importance, a matter primarily-
I will not say wholly, but primarily-for the municipalities closely affected, the districts that would profit largely from the additional traffic that would ensue. I noted that my hon. friend referred to the increasing traffic coming from our neighbours to the south over the Victoria bridge to Montreal, bringing, as is alleged, large 	,
financial gain to Montreal and the communities immediately affected. If the municipalities concerned are not capable of dealing wholly with the matter, I would respectfully suggest that the next body whose attention should be directed to the undertaking is the provincial government at Quebec. My hon. friend knows that, under the provisions of the British North America Act, the transportation facilities that form a liability of the Dominion Government are those that connect one province with another, or a point or points in Canada with a point or noints in a foreign country.
Both ends of this proposed bridge rest within one province, and I would therefore respectfully suggest that if the municipalities find the burden too great the Provincial Government is the next body to which appeal should be made, and if the undertaking is, as my hon. friend states, ' and I have no doubt correctly, one that will be revenue producing, the province of Quebec can borrow just as cheaply as can the Federal Government. The reason for that is not far to seek. Up to the time of the war the Provincial Governments had their responsibilities, and more or less fixed revenues; the war carried with it responsibility for its prosecution, and that responsibility fell on the Federal Government. The Federal Government had to go into the markets of the world and effect huge borrowings, and the result was that both during and after the war there was a surfeit of Dominion Government securities on the markets of the world. The Pro-vinical Governments, including the Quebec Provincial Government, were not in that position. They were called on to bear no additional expenditure; the financial burden on them was relatively light. The result is that several of the provinces, particularly, I know, the province of Quebec and the province of Nova Scotia, were in a superior technical position in the money markets of the world, on account of their comparatively small emission of securities to borrow on favourable terms. So if this undertaking is a money-making one, as the evidence of my hon. friend from Chambly and Vercheres (Mr. Archambault) would seem to indicate, it is quite open to the province of Quebec to go into the market and borrow the funds it requires to assist in the construction of this bridge in the way it deems best, and I am sure our friends in the Quebec Government will not be slow to take advantage of a good business opening, for the people of that province have a deservedly high

reputation for taking advantage of opportunities of increasing the provincial revenue, and of making the most of opportunities that are passing. I shall not elaborate this point further.
I would simply suggest to my hon. friends who have spoken so earnestly in support of this project, and in so doing they were carrying out the traditions of their predecessors in this Parliament, that they approach the municipal authorities first, and the provincial authorities next, and if these will indicate to what extent they are prepared to support the plan of constructing an additional bridge and to bear a share of the expenditure involved, notwithstanding the fact that this Government has large liabilities, liabilities that it will not shirk, it will take ths matter under consideration and will not hesitate to take whatever appropriate action its liabilities in this connection should indicate.


Joseph Archambault: Do I understand my hon. friend to state that the Federal Government is refusing altogether financial assistance to the project?


Fleming Blanchard McCurdy: No, undoubtedly, I did not say so. I was simply pointing out to my hon. friend, who I am sure will be the first to concede the point, that local improvements although important are primarily matters of local concern, and that a liability that cannot be shouldered by the local municipalities might properly be brought before the provincial authorities. When these -two have considered their liabilities, and determined what part they will take, I am sure this Government will be glad to hear from them, and to take under careful consideration what its liability in the matter may be, and what assistance it may be prepared to render in connection with this project, the necessity for which, I think, is generally conceded.


Joseph Archambault: Mr. Speaker, I have only a few words to add. I was very glad ideed to hear the Minister of Public Works state that he was convinced, as I am myself, of the necessity for the construction of this bridge. I was very glad also to have the support of my hon. friend from Laprairie and Napierville (Mr. Lanc-tot). There was one point in the speech of my hon. friend from Laprairie and Napierville, however, to which I wish to draw the attention of the House. The hon. member stated that it would be possible to enlarge the Victoria bridge in order to make
room for two roadways. Now I am informed that this suggestion has teen submitted to competent engineers, who have stated that it is an absolute impossibility, that the bridge as it is built now would not permit another roadway on the north or on the south side. I pointed out in speaking to the resolution that the heavy locomotives of the large American railways do not dare to go over that bridge on account of their tremendous weight and the relative weakness of the bridge.
The Minister of Public Works has said that this is more in the nature of a local undertaking. I though I had sufficiently elaborated that point when speaking to the resolution, by showing that the amount of money that would be brought not only to Montrea!l but to the country at large by the increased tourist traffic that would come with better communication makes the project a national one, because this money would benefit the whole country. I think I showed that the project was not one of local interest only, by also pointed out that it would be a tremendous aid to the railways in connecting the two lines of the Canadian National railways, that is, the Canadian Northern on the Island of Montreal, and the Intercolonial railway on the South Shore. So the project may be said to be of national interest. At the same time, in the plan I have suggested, under which the money would be borrowed partly from the Federal Government, partly from the Provincial Government, and partly from the municipality, the tolls collected on the bridge would serve to pay the interest and provide for the requirements of a sinking fund.
I believe that the acceptance of my resolution on this project would carry out the idea of the Minister of Public Works. I asked the minister if he was stating that the Government had definitely decided not to give financial aid towards the construction of this bridge. His answer was that the Government had not so decided, but that if the municipalities and the Provincial Government, after looking into the matter, came here with a certain plan the Federal Government might give help in the last resort. Therefore I submit the minister should accept my resolution. When the minister made his statement it seemed to me that he was rather disappointed at my attitude. He stated that he expected that I would enlarge the scope of my argument and would finally ask for a grant from the Government. I am not making any



request of the kind. I am only 9 p.m. asking for the support of the Government for the project. My resolution simply asks that the Government declare itself favourable to it. I again make a plea to the Minister of Public Works and ask him to read the resolution carefully. He will then find that outside of invoking the general support of the Government in the interest of the project the Government is not committed to any future expenditure for this purpose. At the same time	I shall be very glad
to have even the Government's moral support toward the construction of this bridge. It might enable the municipalities and the Provincial Government to elaborate a suitable plan and then with the Federal Government's support behind it the people would accord the project better support. Of course if the Government does not accept the resolution I shall have to withdraw it. I did not introduce the resolution in order to force a vote upon it but simply to arouse discussion and obtain the opinion of the House. I hope, therefore, that the Government will accept the motion.
Resolution withdrawn.


DISTRIBUTION OF THE HANSARD IN THE POST OFFICES OF THE COUNTRY.
Mr. J. E. PREVOST (Terrebonne) (Translation) moved:: That, in the opinion of this House, it is in the public interest to allow the public to obtain official information on the work of the Parliament of Canada and to be acquainted with the ministerial declarations, the answers made to questions and interpellations of members and the speeches made in the House, as well as in the Senate.
That the easiest way to put such information within thp reach of the people is to keep a French and an English copy of Hansard in conspicuous places in all the post offices of the country where they could be consulted at any time during office hours.
He said: Mr Speaker, this motion speaks for itself, so it seems that I could dispense with making any comments on the matter.
However in order that I may abide by the prevailing practice in this House, you will allow me, Mr. Speaker, to offer a few remarks. This motion suggests an effective way of more thoroughly informing the public on the labours of the Canadian Parliament, of deriving the most benefit from the Hansard, which is undoubtedly useful, but the high cost, which is not wholly justified by the services it renders, while it could do so much more for the public.
TMr. Archam'bau'lt.]
I need not insist, Mr. Speaker, that the doings and utterances of the members of parliament are of keen interest to the electors. Moreover, is it not a duty for every elector, every citizen, anxious to see his country well governed, and properly represented in the Commons, to acquaint himself with the questions debated in the House of Parliament, to know what opinions were expressed on any important matter by the members of the Government, what position was taken by the political parties on such and such an occasion? Now, there is but one official and sure source of information on the doings and sayings of the minsters, of the Senators, of the Members of the House, it is to read Hansard. There the speeches and the proceedings in Parliament are faithfully reported. But how to render this reading possible for the mass of the people and even for the educated men of each locality? There is an easy way to do so and it should, to my mind, be adopted by the Government. Why should not a French and an English copy of the Hansard be sent to every postmaster with instruction to place it within reach of all those wishing to consult it? The post office is the nation's house, open to everyone. Let the report of sessional debates be deposited there, so that the speeches and the votes of the legislators may be made officially known to those who have a right and the duty to become acquainted with them.
It would be a reflection on our character to spread the belief that we feared publicity and preferred to keep our doings in the dark. No, I am sure, on the contrary, that all the members of this House would be happy to put within the reach of the public and especially of their constituents the full text of their speeches. The unfavourable press is generally clever enough to publish only that which suits its purpose. I believe it is supremely important to make it possible for the public to be reliably informed as to the sayings and doings of the members. How many times have we not seen false notions spread among the public, give rise to discussions, bring about erroneous opinions which could have easily been rectified if the text of the parliamentary debates had been available. Whatever he said of Hansard', I think that in this country as well as in all others, it is necessary to have an official report of the parliamentary debates where exact information may be looked for. Is not Hansard the only official publication where are to be found registered the ministerial statements,

the words and the votes of our legislators?
I admit that it is costly. All the more reason for making of it an instrument of useful and popular public information, and for making it as efficient as possible. Generally speaking, the Government should without delay take the necessary measures to spread among the Canadian public, the political education Which it lacks. There exist innumerable official documents which are of absolutely no utility for the people who even know nothing of their existence. That is the thought which induced one of our former Governors General, Lord Grey, to suggest that the people should be made familiar with the blue books. He was quite right, but it is more practical and more easy to spread the sheets of Hansard than the cumbersome departmental reports.
Hansard, we must remember, costs us about $150,000 a year, and yet it remains a dead letter for the people. It is hardly used by any one but the members who read over their utterances, and the daily papers which publish from it such extracts as they wish or can, and which besides, are not a source of official information offering sufficient guarantee or impartiality.
Far be it from me the thought of criticizing and much less disparaging the difficult and important profession of journalism, to which I have the honour to belong; but it will be admitted that a piece of information given by a newspaper, however serious and independent it may be, may always be disputed by anyone displeased with it, while the Report of the Debates is an authentic and un disputable document.
A few copies of Hansard are sent to some libraries, to universities, to several colleges and to a restricted number of clubs, but that costly record remains unknown to the public. There are at most 200 subscrib-. ers. It is proper to render it more popular,. more accessible to all, especially to country folks, who for a large part get only weekly newspapers wherein parliamentary reports are necessarily most incomplete.
It would be a boon for the country folks to have a place where they would be sure to find parliamentary publications. In a large number of parishes it is entirely impossible to-day to obtain reports of the House, unless you go to the residences of professional men-and even then! -You have to make a trip or write in order to obtain information concerning public matters.
In several countries, particularly in France, the official parliamentary report is
circulated among the public and handed out at the doors of churches.
The proposal which I put before the House to-night has already been submitted by me a few years ago, and the press strongly supported it at that time. It is . open to alterations, of course, as far as the details of its application are concerned, but its underlying principle is worthy of the approval of this House. Hansard is now very costly without benefiting the public. Is it not legitimate to spend a few thousand dollars more, if need be, to make that diary of parliamentary debates a record of public usefulness which everybody could consult? There are 12,000 postoffices in Canada. The heavy outlays for Hansard cover the cost of shorthand-writing and type-setting. Those expenses are already incurred. The spending of four or five thousand dollars more, if necessary, could not be an extravagance, in order to popularize this official record, which is costing $150,000 a year without any immediate and real advantage to the people.
Mr. Speaker, the official information contained in Hansard should not be kept within the precinct of parliament, nor be only dealt out to the newspapers, but should be disseminated everywhere so that the citizens would be truly enlightened and the people would acquire the taste and habit of following political events with an open mind.


Mr. J. J. DENIS (Joliette) :: Mr. Speaker, I have great pleasure in seconding the motion of my hon. friend from Terrebonne (Mr. Prevost). He has stated in French his arguments in support of the merits of his proposal, and I shall content myself by expressing in English my endorsement of his arguments. In fact, it would not be necessary for me to supplement the case he has so well made out for the adoption of his motion were it not that the language spoken by him is perhaps not understood by every hon. member.
The resolution recommends:
That, in the opinion of this House, it is in the public interest to allow the public to obtain official information on the work of the Parliament of Canada and to be acquainted with the ministerial declarations, the answers made to questions and interpellations of members and the speeches made in the House, as well as in the Senate.
That the easiest way to put such information within the reach of the people is to keep a French and an English copy of Hansard in conspicuous places in all the post offices of the country where they could be consulted at any time during office hours.

Now, Sir, this resolution is so clearly expressed that there can be no difficulty in at once grasping its idea, which is to put directly before the people what is said and done in this House. At the present time the public is informed of all our proceedings through the medium of the newspapers, but we all know that it is absolutely impossible for their reports to be so complete as to be absolutely accurate; and excellent as are those reports and impartial as it is possible for them to be, we frequently hear hon. members protesting on the floor of this chamber that they have not been correctly reported. The resolution of my hon. friend proposes to give the public a new medium through which they can be informed of our proceedings, and that is through Hansard itself. We have the advantage of having the debates of the House published in French and in English and placed before the members of the House, before the Senate and before a very limited number of persons. The object of this resolution is the placing of Hansard before the public generally. It is just and necessary, and it is also in the interests of the public, of Parliament and the Government, that the debates of the House should be placed before the public in a straightforward way; that is, in such a way that they cannot be questioned. It is necessary to the public, because they pay the cost of the publication of Hansard and they should be entitled to know what their representatives in the House are doing. It is in the interests of Parliament, because those who address the House should have the privilege of having their speeches in their original form and in their entirety placed before the public and particularly before their electors. It is necessary, too, for the Government, because the attitude taken by them from day to day on public questions would be submitted to the public in their entirety and in correct form.
The resolution proposes that one copy in French and one copy in English be deposited in each post office in Canada. The proposal, I understand, can be modified if necessary in the details of its application. Some might say that a copy of French might not be necessary in some centres; others might argue that a copy of English would not be necessary in others. It might be asserted also that a single copy would not be sufficient in large post offices, and other objections might be offered to the motion as presented. The idea in presenting the resolution is not to submit in concrete form a method by which Hansard may 
be given to the public, but to give the House an opportunity of pronouncing itself on the principle embodied in the resolution, namely, the - desirability of placing the official debates of this House before the public.
The idea of placing the debates of the House before the public is in line with the necessities of the times. Up to recently there were in this country only two political parties, the Liberal party and the Conservative party. Their policies were expounded before Parliament through their most eminent members; thes.e were published in the press and given out in fairly accurate form. To-day we have three parties; tomorrow we may have four or more. With each new party in Parliament, with each new idea or new design, a new policy may be developed. New doctrines and new thoughts may be introduced and be placed before the public. It is more important, therefore, than it was in the past that the public should have a full and immediate knowledge of what is going on in this House.
The only objection, if I see one, would be the question of cost-in other words, the increased cost of publishing Hansard. In producing Hansard there is a certain basic cost which remains the same no matter how many copies are printed. I have not the exact figures, but I think my hon. friend from Terrebonne is about right when he says that Hansard is costing the country something like $150,000 a year. Perhaps it costs a little more than that, but let us take his figure; if it costs the country $150,000 to publish Hansard and distribute it among a very limited number of persons -leaving aside for the moment from the consideration that Hansard is printed as a work of record-it should be worth while .spending another $50,000 a year, even more if necessary, in order to provide Hansard to the community at large.
Our people are getting more interested year after year-month after month, I might say-in politics. To-day the political questions which are submitted to this House and to the country are of the highest importance. This is a condition which prevails not only in Canada; it is common throughout the world. In all countries parliaments are confronted with matters of the highest importance, and problems difficult to solve. For all these reasons the public have taken a keener interest in politics of late than they ever did before, and that being the case we should give the public an opportunity of having before them the official record of everything that takes place

222a,
in this House. There are in Canada about twelve thousand post offices. If this suggestion were adopted, these post offices, so far as debates of the House are concerned, would be little libraries in themselves in which every member of the community could inform himself upon the various questions which come before this House. Of course, the people would not be able to go all through Hansard; they could not read everything printed in it. But when a question interesting a particular class of the community came up, the members of that class of the community would have the advantage of consulting Hansard and finding out what was said for and against any proposal in which they were interested.
As I have said, my hon. friend from Terrebonne dealt with this subject much better than I can; I had not prepared any remarks with regard to it. But it seems to me that the suggestion is deserving of the sympathy of the House, and I therefore commend the hon. member for bringing it forward. I shall be glad to support the l'esolution.


Mr. H. B. MORPHY (Perth North) :: Mr. Speaker, I am not quite certain that the mover and the seconder are particularly serious about their advocacy of this radical departure from what is customary at the present time. The first thought that came to me while they were speaking is that, not only is this a radical departure, but it is turning the post offices of the country into what I might call reading rooms which would probably require the setting apart of a room in various public buildings in the nature of a library, and that, in itself, would involve considerable expense. Another idea that came to me was that, for the population and area of Canada, it is very doubtful if there is in the world another country that has to-day a finer press to disseminate the news not only of this Parliament, but of the world, than Canada.
I deprecate the resolution myself when I know that members on this side and, I believe, members on the other side also have been turned down by this Government in nearly everything it has been asked for by way of improvements for the public service and the building of necessary public works. They have been met by refusals on the part of the Government to give what in ordinary times could have been had almost without asking, because of the necessity of such works and improvements. As I view the conduct of this Government to-day it looks as though the Estimates have been slashed and cut down to the bare bone, and this seems to me to be a very inopportune time for hon. gentlemen opposite on the one hand to want to build an expensive bridge to satisfy one section of a community and on the other to crave for the posting up of Hansard in every post office throughout the country, meaning not only the Hansard of this House, but the Hansard of the Senate, and if I understood the mover aright, the journals of the House and other information. The resolution does not set this out, but if I did not mistake what the mover said-and I stand subject to correction-I think he asked for that. In these days, when Canada is burdened with an almost unthinkable debt, when hon. gentlemen opposite, in dealing with the Estimates, are themselves complaining almost unanimously of improper expenditures of money and of the extravagance of this Government, without, I submit, any real justification, it seems rather strange that hon. gentlemen can stand up for something that would satisfy their own whim or fancy and ask the Government to go into riotous expenditures in connection with topics in this House which are served to them daily by their local press, by the metropolitan press, and served in a much more lucid manner than they would ever reach the individual reader through the medium of Hansard.
If I do not mistake the public mind a large number of the people of Canada would like to see Hansard abolished altogether. There is in this country a large and growing feeling that the tremendous expense of the sessions in this House and in the Senate is largely caused by the publication of Hansard. I have heard the suggestion put forward-and it appeals to me very much-that if Hansard cannot be abolished altogether, it could be abolished as regards the proceedings of committees. Then if you added to that some sort of general regulation that, on ordinary subjects, speeches, except by leaders of the House, should be limited to twenty or twenty-five minutes, that is, I think, the line of thought that we should go on. I do not know anything that contributes to the length of the session so much as the unlimited right to speak as long as you like in this House. I believe that if Hansard were curtailed so that probably, instead of three copies being given to each member, the number were limited to two or even one, expense would be saved.
I feel that the subject is introduced at an inopportune time, and it might have been allowed to stand until this country had got

beyond the burden of debt that Canada has now to face. The watchword should be to curtail and curtail and curtail expenses instead of adding to them for a purpose of this kind. Once more I say that the press of this country, the small paper as well as the large, gives a short resume of what goes on in this House, and if there is in the country any individual who wants to get a better resume, the member for the constituency is available with his Hansard on file and two extra copies, which can be handed to the individual who seeks information that cannot be obtained in the daily press.


Mr. H. A. MACKIE (Edmonton):: Mr. Speaker, I wish at the outset, to express my gratitude that this debate has not taken the proportions that debates on previous occasions have taken when the question of the French language has been brought before this House. It is gratifying that in the last two years matters of this sort have been brought before the House and discussed intelligently without having raised questions which become personal both as to the individual and certain communities. The resolution before the House, I believe, is brought forward sincerely and not in order to satisfy whims and fancies, as has been stated by the hon member for North Perth (Mr. Morphy). It is true that the country is getting reports which are perhaps not accurate or at all events which are coloured by the various political papers which disseminate news in their respective jurisdictions. The proposition, however, which is before the House at the present time is that the Government should go to the expense in the long run of establishing what are actually to be archives to be kept in post offices or other public places where the public may resort. That, I believe, is an impossibility as a Government undertaking, both because of the expense it would entail and because of the question as to the advisability of establishing such archives throughout the country.
The dissemination of news in an accurate way, however, is a question which deserves a great deal of consideration and without intending to move any amendment, I think the mover of the resolution would be well advised if he asked this Government to undertake ithe expense of giving the country that information which he has suggested to all those who may so desire it, their names to be tabulated in a list previously to the opening of the session each year. In that way those who are not now receiving Hansard and those papers which they desire

to have for the purpose of informing themselves about particular problems, may have them at a small cost. Let me call your attention, Sir, to the fact also that there is a danger perhaps in acquiescing without some reserve to the resolution which is now before the House in that I find, for instance, that in the year 1707-08 we had before the House a petition praying that railway and other public companies be required to use the French language as well as the English language in their dealings with the public. I find also that in 1909 there was an order of the House for all correspondence and so forth respecting the use of the French language in services of public utility, and that there was also in the same year a petition respecting the printing in both languages of the time of arrival and departure of the trains. These requests are being made to the House of Commons repeatedly by various members, undoubtedly from proper motives and with the best of intentions, but they complicate the subject, and speaking for myself, I would rather support the resolution before the House than the petitions which have been placed before us on previous occasions, because the motive in the present instance is purely that of giving news and accurate information to the public. However, for the reasons I have given, I do not think the resolution will receive the sympathy of the House. Therefore, I think hon. members should rather busy themselves to find out how many of their constituents would require Hansard and to make provision with the Government in order that these people may get it and secure the accurate information they desire.


Hon. J. A. CALDER (Minister of Immigration and Colonization):: 
Jules-Édouard Prévost: (Translation.) Mr. Speaker, at the risk of prolonging this debate, I wish to extend thanks in my mother tongue to the three members on the Government side who have willingly admitted the soundness of the reason given for the amendment I have moved. I must say, however, that I do not agree with the hon. member for North Perth, when he doubts the usefulness of the Hansard itself. I think that in this country as well as in others, as I said when I moved my resolution, it is not only proper, but necessary, that there be an official document reproducing the original text of the debates of the House of Commons and the Senate, and where vouchers of our parliamentary proceedings may be found.
If the hon. member for North Perth is sincere, as I am inclined to believe, he should bring down a motion to abolish Hansard, and let me assure him, he would not wait long to find that the large majority of this House, differ in opinion with him.
I wish specially to thank the hon. member for Edmonton (Mr. Mackie) for the kind and favourable attitude he has taken on this resolution. The summary of arguments which were advanced against the wish I express, is that its realization would add a new expenditure to our budget, at a time when the country's finances are already in a precarious state. Mr. Speaker, it is precisely to avoid an unprofitable and direct expenditure to the country of $125,000 to $150,000 per year, that I want this House to vote an additional amount of five, eight, or even ten thousand dollars, so as to give to the expenditure of $100,000 or more all its effectiveness and thus justify its existence. However, since the Government pleads poverty and admits its impossibility to further add to its budget an expenditure of eight or ten thousand dollars without being bankrupt, I feel myself obliged, Mr. Speaker, to withdraw my resolution for this year and shall await another more able government which will place the finances of this country on a more flourishing basis.
Motion withdrawn.


DIVERSION OF WATER FROM LAKE MICHIGAN INTO CHICAGO DRAINAGE CANAL
Rodolphe Lemieux: For a copy of all correspondence, telegrams and other documents exchanged between the Government of Canada and the Government of the .United States in connection with the application of the Trustees of the Chicago Sanitary district for a permit to divert 10,000 cubic feet of water per second from Lake Michigan into the Chicago drainage Canal.
He said: Mr. Speaker, while the Minister of Marine and Fisheries (Mr. Ballantyne) is in the House I wish to direct his attention to the importance of this question, which affects not only the harbour of Montreal but navigation generally on the St. Lawrence. I have reference to the diversion of the waters of Lake Machigan into the Mississippi via the Chicago Drainage Canal. I understand that a commission appointed some years ago to regulate the flow of international waters authorized the sanitary organization which has charge of the Chicago Drainage Canal to divert 4,167 cubic feet per second. I am informed that at present the Chicago Drainage Canal receives a flow of 9,000 cubic feet from Lake Michigan That, however, does not seem to be sufficient and big interests in Chicago are now applying to the United States Congress to divert 10,000 cubic feet per second into the canal from Lake Michigan. For many years Canada has been looking very anxiously towards Chicago in her desire to protect her interests. The late Government and one of my hon. friend's predecessors, the Hon. Mr. Brodeur, and, I believe, my hon. friend also and his Government, have done their best to safeguard Canadian interests; but those gentlemen from Chicago seem to be somewhat enterprising, and under cover of a drainage canal scheme it is to-day publicly conceded in the western states that they are not only working with a view to diverting the waters for the purpose of securing a drainage canal for Chicago, but are above all attempting to capture the western trade by that diversion towards the Mississippi. Of that I have the evidence. I was reading the other day one of the New York papers when my attention was drawn to

the project of the proposed St. Lawrence River canal. The writer said:
Since the United States already has one completed outlet from the Great Lkkes to the seaboard, viz., the New York Barge Canal, and has another under consideration and, in fact, under way, via the Chicago Drainage Canal, the present problem of an additional outlet via the St. Lawrence river is naturally a Canadian problem solely, and would ordinarily attract only Canadian interest and only Canadian discussion.
So that, in common parlance, they made no bones about the matter in the western states, and even in the eastern states, as regards the ultimate object aimed at by the authorities in charge of the Chicago Drainage Canal. They intend to divert thence, by way of the river Mississippi to the gulf. This matter very seriously affects the level of the river St. Lawrence, as the House will readily perceive. My hon. friend the Minister of Marine and Fisheries (Mr. Ballantyne), as a member of the Montreal Harbour Board and as a business man in the great metropolis, has taken quite a keen interest in maritime matters, and he will recall the attitude taken on this question a few years ago, in 1912 particularly, by the shipping federation of Montreal. The Shipping Federation protested most vehemently against the attempt made by the Chicago authorities to divert a larger flow of water from lake Michigan to the Chicago Drainage Canal, because, in their opinion, such a diversion would lower the level of the St. Lawrence at Montreal and elsewhere; at Montreal it would lower it by 101 inches, which would ultimately reduce the carrying capacity of Montreal shipping by a large tonnage. Let me give the House an idea of how this project, if carried out, would affect the level of the water at Montreal. In August 1919 the highest point reached in the harbour of Montreal was 31 feet 7 inches, and the lowest 30 feet 9 inches; the levels dropping to 30 feet 11 inches and 30 feet 3 inches in September, and rising 32 feet 9 inches and 31 feet 2 inches1 in November. In August, 1920, the highest level was 30 feet 1 inch and the lowest 29 feet 3 inches; being between 30 feet 7' inches and 28 feet 3 inches in October, and 29 feet 8 inches and 28 feet 9 inches in November. Thus, it will be seen that any further diversion of water into that drainage canal might very seriously affect the navigation on the river St. Lawrence. Not long ago, I think, in the month of February, an engineer of note and repute, Mr. Shenehon, published in a review of considerable authority in the engineering 
circles of America, an article in which he proved conclusively the very serious consequences to the harbour of Montreal and the river St. Lawrence that would attend a larger diversion of these waters. I will quote his words:
The diversion of 10,000 cubit feet of water per second at Chicago will lessen the cargo-carrying capacity of each of the big vessels about 400 tons on each trip. This is a substantial damage. The loss in water power at Niagara approximates 300,000 electric horse power; and on the St. Lawrence perhaps 200,000 electric horse power. Very little of this loss is made up, as the water goes towards the Mississippi river. This power loss means not so much at the present time as it will twenty-five of fifty years from now.
It is stated that if the Chicago interests obtain the authority they seek from Congress they are ready to do some compensation works which would, in their opinion, make up for the decrease in the level of water in the river St. Lawrence. But, Mr. Speaker, engineering authorities agree, on the other hand, that no compensation work could restore to Canada what would be lost by that proposed diversion. Besides, Canada can not afford to take any risk in a matter of such vital importance.
So my purpose in rising this evening is to call the attention of the Government to the very serious nature of this application which is being made by the Chicago Drainage Canal authorities to Congress, and I would be pleased to hear what the Government has done towards protecting Canadian interests in the matter. If this application was granted by the United States authorities, not only would the level of the water for navigation purposes be affected but, as this engineer states it would also affect the electrical power development on the Niagara river and on the river St. Lawrence generally. I suppose that the Government has been made aware of the application in question and that due regard has been had for the interests of Canada in the matter.


Right Hon. ARTHUR MEIGHEN:: Mr. Speaker, when the hon. gentleman rose to address the House on this subject I sent to the Department of External Affairs for the file covering the question. It has not arrived, but from memory I think I can indicate pretty accurately what has oc-eured in relation to this application, and indeed with relation to the entire history of the diversion. The Chicago Drainage Canal was built in the nineties, commencing in 1892, and the period of construction ex-

tended pretty well through that decade. I do not think it can be argued very successfully that serious objections were taken at that time on the part of Canada to the construction of that canal for the purpose for which it was then believed to be under construction. It would not be correct to say that no objection was taken; but the objections were not pressed to the serious extent that doubtless they would have been pressed, had the intentions of those who had the construction under way been thoroughly understood. Upon completion of it a certain diversion took place. I think it is correct to say that there has been no diversion from the waters of Lake Michigan through the Chicago Drainage Canal to which consent has been given on the part of this Dominion, nor indeed to which acquiescence has been given. The Drainage Canal carries the water out of Lake Michigan, consequently out of the whole of the Great Lakes, through some smaller rivers of the United States and finally diverts it into the waters of the Mississippi, and therefore none of the water so diverted ever returns to the basin from which it is turned. It therefore follows that, to the extent of the deflection of the water, there is a lowering of the levels of the Great Lakes, and a lowering of the levels of the river St. Lawrence, entailing in both cases difficulties of navigation, and a reduction of power. An application was made by the Chicago Drainage 10 p.m. District to the Secretary of War and in 1901, the application was granted permitting diversion to the extent of four thousand one hundred and sixty-seven cubic feet per second. The claim advanced was that this water was to be used for the purpose of sewage disposal for the city of Chicago, and so far as I know that has been the primary purpose of the diversion throughout. There have grown up, however, along the line of the canal, certain manufactures dependent upon the power developed on that canal, and no doubt their interests are bound up with the maintenance of the right to divert and its extension if they can secure it. Although the rate of diversion was limited by the Secretary of War to the number of cubic feet per second I have mentioned, as a matter of fact the Chicago Drainage District has diverted, so our information goes, at least twice the amount authorized and has maintained that diversion. This country has protested and has not stopped at protesting-


Rodolphe Lemieux: Nine thousand odd cubic feet.


Arthur Meighen: Nine thousand odd cubic feet is the amount of the diversion they have actually perpetrated, if I may use the term. We have taken pains to lay the facts very thoroughly before the United States Government, and to press the claim that the natural course of the waters of the Great Lakes system should not be interfered with; that Canada has an interest in preserving those waters from interference; and that there should be no interference with them without the consent of this country. We have taken the ground, if I may so express it, that as between the United States and Canada there should be maintained the common law right of natural flow of water; that the owner of the water higher up should not be permitted to use it to the disadvantage of the rights of the riparian, or other owner, further down-such rights as he would have if the waters flowed naturally-and that these rights should apply on both sides of the boundary-with respect to our waters flowing into the lakes as well as with respect to theirs. There has been an application recently for a very considerable increase in the water diverted. That application has been resisted on the part of this country, and I am sure the hon. member will find that there has been no failure to protect the interests of Canada: to take such means as we can take with dignity and effect, to protect the rights of the country in relation to this diversion. It must be realized that as the drainage district was constructed, and as this method was actually put into operation for taking care of the sewage of the city of Chicago, it will take some time for other and more modern methods of sewage disposal to be adopted. I do not think there will be a present disposition on the part of this country to refuse the use of this water so authorized to be diverted for the purposes of the carrying away of sewage-I do not know just how they use the water-if steps are immediately taken to instal a better method. But we do contend that the diversion should be limited at least to that, and we maintain that there is no right of, diversion at all. Only a few days ago a message passed from the Government of Canada to the Government of the United States in regard to this latest application, and I can assure the House and my hon. friend that it is the intention of the Government to press the objection of this country to the maintenance of the diver-

sion as now existing, and particularly to any extension thereof.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.

Andrew Ross McMaster: For a return showing the names of the members of the Government who are directors in incorporated companies, the names of the companies in which said members of the Government are directors : the contracts, if any, since October 30, 1917, the Government of Canada, or any department thereof, have entered into with such companies: the contracts, if any, the National Railways of Canada, whether conducted by a department of Government or under corporate form, have entered into with such companies since October 30, 1917 ; the contracts, if any, the Canadian Mercantile Marine, Limited, or any of the incorporated companies representing individual ships, have entered into with such companies since said dates; showing full details of the contracts herein referred to and the amount involved in each.
He said: Mr. Speaker, I will not delay the House for any length of time in connection with this motion. Some time ago I introduced a Bill providing that hon. gentlemen who accepted portfolios as members of the Cabinet should within fifteen days thereafter resign any directorships which they hold. That proposed legislation was not favourably considered by the House and was defeated. I think it is fitting that if members of this or any other Government desire to retain the directorships which they hold in private or in public companies they should divulge to the House what interests they possess in companies which may from time to time be doing business with the Government. It seems to me that that is a most elementary principle of proper administration,-that where there is a possibility of conflict, the conflicting interest should be disclosed in order that people may be put on their guard. I do not think that the adoption of this resolution would in any way reflect upon any member of this or any other government. But it lays down what I believe to be a sound principle, that if the Government is not prepared to follow the line of conduct which I advocated, if it is not willing to have the system of interlocking directorates come to an end outside the Cabinet door, then certainly this House and the public should be advised as to what directorships are held by Cabinet ministers, and what contracts, if any, have been entered into with any department of the Government by those companies in which the ministers are directors. One will often find in the by-laws of a company that its directors who are also directors in another 
company are not prevented from dealing with the company itself, but in such event they must, after the directors' meeting where these matters come under consideration, divulge to their fellow directors the fact that they are directors in the other company. I think it is a most elementary principle of sound administration, and a proper attitude to adopt, and I trust the House will see its way clear to pass this order for a return.


Arthur Meighen: Mr. Speaker, to the order in the main there can be no objection. There is a portion of it, though, which calls for contracts made by the National Railway directorate with certain companies. If the order passes, it should be on the understanding that the information called for in the other portion may be brought down at once, but that the information covered by this particular portion will be brought down only if in accordance with the report of the committee which is dealing with that subject.


Andrew Ross McMaster: I have to accept my right hon. friend's proposal, Mr. Speaker, on the principle that half a loaf is better than no bread.


Arthur Meighen: It will be better than half.


Andrew Ross McMaster: Say three-quarters.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.

[Stage Direction]
On the motion being called for second reading of Bill No. 18 to amend the Criminal Code so as to provide for the revision of excessive or inadequate punishments-
Thomas Mitchell March Tweedie: I am ready to go on, Mr. Speaker, but the right hon. Minister of Justice (Mr. Doherty) wishes the Bill to stand in the absence of certain hon. members.
Motion stands.


CANADA SHIPPING ACT AMENDMENT (PUBLIC HARBOURS)
[Stage Direction]
On the motion of Hon. A. K. Maclean (Halifax) Bill No. 40 to amend the Canada Shipping Act (Public Harbours), was read the second time, and the House went into committee thereon, Mr. Boivin in the Chair.
On section 1-penalty for breach of harbour regulations increased:
Mr. MACLEAN (Halifax):: This Bill
proposes to amend section 855 of the Ship-

ping Act. Section 854 enables the Governor in Council to make regulations for the control of harbours and section 855 empowers the Governor in Council to provide penalties for violation of any regulations that are so established. The purpose of the amendment is to increase the maximum penalty for violation of any regulations that may be made by the Governor in Council in respect of harbours. I may say that I have submitted the Bill to officers of the Department of Marine and Fisheries and I understand that it meets with their approval.


Mr. McKENZIE:: I have not had the pleasure of hearing an explanation of this Bill. Possibly the minister or the hon. member who has charge of the Bill would give us some idea of what are the regulations for the infraction of which this penalty-which seems to be rather drastic 

is to be applied.


Alexander Kenneth Maclean: As a result of the widespread use by steamers of oil as fuel a new problem has arisen in the harbours of the world. A very large proportion of the world's tonnage to-day is propelled by oil-burning engines, and the difficulty arises from the practice of these vessels of discharging the residue of oil contained in their tanks after reaching harbour, for the purpose of cleaning them out. The oil floats upon the waters, causing destruction to fish life, if there be any within the harbour, and has on more than one case been the cause of fire in a seaport town. In Halifax harbour, which, of course, I know very well, a considerable number of lobsters, which are frequently kept in the water until the actual moment of shipment, were injured through the discharge of oil by steamers on the waters of the harbour. I could give many instances of very serious trouble resulting from this cause. The matter has been the subject of investigation in many countries, but so far as I know, no country has adopted any specific law with regard to it. The most they have done to meet the situation is to empower harbour boards to make regulations. At present the Governor in Council is empowered to prescribe a penalty for violation of harbour regulations up to the sum of $100, but that penalty has heen ineffective in prohibiting offences of this nature, because, as I am informed, it is much cheaper for a steamer to pay the penalty of $100 and put their waste oil upon the harbour waters than to pay for the extraction of the oil from the
tanks and get rid of it in that way. There is also a great deal of difficulty in enforcing the penalty. Steamers will enter a harbour late at night and discharge the waste oil from their tanks, and the oil will he carried by wind and currents for long distances. The matter was recently the subject of investigation by an Association of Fire Underwriters of the United States, who recommended that it should be a misdemeanour to discharge oil from the tanks of oil-burning steamers within one hundred miles of a harbour or river. I do not think that that regulation has yet been adopted by any port. The purpose of this amendment is merely to give the Governor in Council power to prescribe a maximum penalty of $1,000 for the commission of any offence established by way of regulation. The amendment, I think, is about the only one that will meet the situation for the time being. So far as I know, it meets with favour from all persons who have knowledge of the conditions.


Mr. BALLANTYNE:: I was not aware that the hon. member for Halifax (Mr. Maclean) was going to bring this Bill up to-night; it had not been brought to my attention at all, except for a moment or two by my deputy minister. I am inclined to agree with the suggestion of the member for North Cape Breton and Victoria (Mr. McKenzie) that the present regulations and penalties are sufficient. We all know that the shipping interests are the paramount interests, and to raise the penalty from $200, which I believe to be the present maximum, to $1,000 seems rather severe, especially in view of the fact that oil is being more largely used instead of coal.
I regret that the oil from steamers in Halifax harbour has killed lobsters, which, I understand, the dealers keep alive in crates in the water for some time before shipment.	But it seems to me that
the present regulations are sufficient and that	to	increase the penalty
to $1,000 would be onerous to shipping. If my hon. friend will agree, I would like to move that the committee rise and report progress, and we can defer consideration of this Bill until a later date so as to give me an opportunity to give it the consideration that I should do. The hon. member has not seen me personally; I have had no opportunity whatsoever to consider the Bill or how far-reaching it may be; but the very fact that the penalty has been increased from $200 to $1,000 seems to me rather severe on the shipping interest.


Alexander Kenneth Maclean: I do not quite see why consideration of the Bill should be deferred. This is a Bill of a public nature; there is nothing difficult about the matter, and I think we might very well dispose of it at the preesnt time. My hon. friend says that a maximum penalty of $1,000 would be onerous upon the shipowners. It would not be onerous upon shipowners if they did not violate the regulations. Surely they have no right to inflict grave injury upon other interests, and if they do, with the knowledge that there exists a law against a certain offence, they cannot complain. I do not think my hon. friend quite understands the purport of the Bill, or he would not ask me to postpone consideration of it. The Bill merely empowers the Governor in Council to make a regulation prescribing the maximum penalty. Application will later on be made to the Governor in Council doubtless through the Department of Marine and Fisheries, asking for the approval of a new regulation in certain harbours of Canada. When that application is made, the Governor in Council will, of course, give due consideration to the application and if, in their judgment, a penalty of $1,000 is considered excessive, it will be within their power to make it $500 or $700 or $800. The legislation, therefore, is merely permissive and empowers the Governor in Council to make a regulation and prescribe a penalty, and the statute merely fixes a maximum penalty-I fear my hon. friend did not understand that at first-so that the public interest will be protected and the matter, after all, is fully in the hands of the Governor in Council. I am sorry my hon. friend did not see the Bill before this. I discussed it with the officers of his department and, of course, I thinght it would be brought to his attention. If the Minister of Marine and Fisheries desires that consideration of the Bill be deferred, of course I must consent, but I trust that he will allow it to go through in this form.


Charles Colquhoun Ballantyne: I am very glad my hon. friend agrees with the suggestion I made a moment ago. I quite understand the purport of the Bill; but I would like to have an opportunity of finding out the views of the shipping people more than I know them at the present time, and I would also like to have an opportunity of discussing the matter with my hon. friend. Therefore, inasmuch as the hon. member for Halifax is agreeable, I would move that 
the committee rise, report progress and ask leave to sit again.


Joseph Archambault: Mr. Chairman-


Georges Henri Boivin: The motion that the committee rise and report progress is not debatable, unless the minister desires to withdraw the motion.


Charles Colquhoun Ballantyne: I withdraw the motion.


Joseph Archambault: Will there be an opportunity to discuss the Bill any further? I am interested in the Bill myself. I have had complaints practically every year that oil is covering the river on almost the whole shore from St. Lambert to near Sorel, contaminating the water.


Charles Colquhoun Ballantyne: I can assure the hon. member for Chambly and Vercheres (Mr. Archambault) that when the Bill is under consideration again, every opporun-ity will be given, not only to him, but to every other hon. member in the House who cares to take an interest in it.


Mr. FIELDING:: The Bill deals entirely with penalties, not with regulation of offences. Among the regulations outstanding is there one forbidding the deposit of oil? .
Mr. MACLEAN (Halifax) A section of the Shipping Act enables the Governor in Council to make any regulation, including one of this nature.


William Stevens Fielding: There is none in
existence yet?


Alexander Kenneth Maclean: A regulation is now in existence in respect of this particular offence, but the maximum penalty is, I think, only $100, and it has been found ineffective.


Daniel Duncan McKenzie: I wish to bring to the notice of the Minister of Marine and Fisheries (Mr. Ballantyne) and the senior member for Halifax (Mr. Maclean) that within navigable waters the purposes of navigation are supreme. The first thing to receive the right of way is the steamer or sailing vessel that comes into a harbour within the rules and regulations, as we generally understand them, of navigation, and the right of a vessel when she comes into that harbour is superior to that of a man who may have some fish in a crate under the water. The right of the steamer or war vessel that might come into the harbour of Halifax or Sydney using that kind of fuel is not likely to be subordin-

ated to that of a man who is using a trap or something of that nature along the shore. Far be it from me to belittle for one moment the interest of the man who conserves fish or anything else under the water, but we must not lose sight of the fact that in every legislation that has to do with navigation, the right to navigate is supreme. I would also like to submit to the consideration of the minister when he comes to deal with this matter, that it has always been recognized in this country that any legislation of a general character affecting shipping should be submitted to the British Board of Trade because, when we legislate for shipping, we are legislating, not only for our shipping, but for British shipping and shipping throughout the world. If the minister looks at the list of subjects in the British North America Act over which this Parliament has control and over which provincial legislatures in their own spheres or zones have control, he will find that shipping is not included. It has always been recognized by this Parliament, in its relation to British authorities, that there was something withheld in regard to shipping, and when we come to legislate in a general way, it has always been found desirable that the consent and co-operation of the British Board of Trade should be obtained in connection with matters of this kind. Even if I had power to insist in such a matter, I, am not at all insisting upon it, but I am bringing it to the notice of the minister.


William Stevens Fielding: I am afraid the hon. member for Cape Breton North and Victoria (Mr. McKenzie) has hardly done justice to the lobsters. I once got into trouble by saying that I represented more lobsters than probably any other man in this House. The fishing industry in this country is one that is hardly less important than the shipping industry.


Rodolphe Lemieux: You forget Magdalen Islands.


William Stevens Fielding: It ought to be possible to devise means whereby the reasonable rights of shipping could be protected without damaging the fishing interests of the country. The fishing industry, including the lobster industry, is one of the greatest assets of Canada, and anything at all which interferes with that industry is a grave and serious matter which we should not adopt without giving it more attention than we have yet been able to give to this matter. I have no doubt that modern science
will find means for disposing of this refuse oil by burning or some other process; * but if it is to be a fight between the shipping and the lobster, just now' I am for the lobster.


Charles Colquhoun Ballantyne: I move that the committee rise, report progress and ask leave to sit again.
Progress reported.


FERTILIZER ACT AMENDMENT
[Stage Direction]
Mr. T. W. CALDWELL (Victoria and Carleton) moved the second reading of Bill No. 55, to amend the Fertilizer Act.
Arthur Meighen: I would be glad to
hear from the hon. member if he is going to discuss the motion, and I would like the privilege of speaking to it. I cannot say that I know very much about the Bill, and if it seems in any way objectionable, in the absence of the Minister of Agriculture, I would like it to stand until later.


Mr. CALDWELL:: Mr. Speaker, as I
said in introducing this Bill, it does not propose to make any drastic change in the Fertilizer Act, but is simply to provide for the better marking of the packages in which commercial fertilizers are sold, so that the purchaser may know just what he is buying and whether he is getting his money's worth. I will endeavour as briefly as possible to give the House the reasons why I introduced this Bill. The Bill provides in part that:	.
Subsection one of section two A of The Fertilizers Act, 1909, as enacted by chapter twenty of the statutes of 1919, is amended by adding after paragraph (iv) the following paragraph :-
* "(v) the materials from which the fertilizer is made and the amount of each such material" ;
I will deal with that clause first. When a fertilizer manufacturer applies for a registration number the Act provides that he must inform the department of what materials his fertilizer is made, but when he sells to the farmer he does not have to state on the package from what source the chemicals are derived. Now in the compounding of commercial fertilizers, there are three main ingredients, nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash, Nitrogen, which is more commonly known as ammonia, is derived from several different sources, but the three well known sources from which it is derived for use as a plant food are nitrate of soda, sulphate of ammonia, and tankage. There are other sources which are less known, and which are not considered very valuable from the point of view of plant food. There are some which

are not plant food at all, although on analysis they may yield nitrogen.
In the-making of a commercial fertilizer, the best results, are obtained from a combination of nitrate of soda, sulphate of ammonia, and tankage, for this reason: Nitrate of soda is so soluble that as soon as it comes into contact with the moist earth, it at once becomes available for plant food. Now a fertilizer composed of 4 per cent ammonia, made of nitrate of soda, would not last more than a month or six weeks, for the simple reason that the nitrate is so soluble that it leaches away in the soil and even evaporates if it comes in contact with the air. A fertilizer containing 4 per cent of ammonia should have about 200 pounds of nitrate of soda, 100 pounds of sulphate of ammonia, and 200 pounds of tankage, to make the best plant food to last for a season crop such as potatoes. In market gardening where you can apply nitrates at diiferent times throughout the season nitrate is the best source of ammonia, but for a crop like potatoes, where you must put your whole supply of fertilizer on when you plant the crop, because it is impossible to work it around the plants during the summer, nitrate of soda is not so good as the mixture I spoke of, because when you combine the three, the nitrate of soda becomes immediately available ; the sulphate of ammonia is 'slower to dissolve and becomes available about the time the nitrate is exhausted, and the tankage, in turn, takes up the work later in the season when the sulphate is exhausted. At present, nitrate is cheaper than sulphate or tankage to give the same amount of ammonia. It is quite possible that the tendency is to use the cheapest material, notwithstanding the fact that it will not give as good results. I should .iust like to quote an extract or two so that the House will realize the necessity for a farmer knowing what he is getting when he buys fertilizer. Previous to the war, when fertilizers were cheap we had very little complaint about poor fertilizers, but we have to-day now that prices are high. The tendency seems to be, when prices are high, to use cheaper substitutes in order to make a higher profit. That is human nature, I imagine. The first extract is from the St. John Standard, of March 10:
Perth, N.B., March 10.-Two hundred and fifty farmers in this district are refusing to pay for fertilizer secured last spring, amounting to about $72,000, claiming it was of no value. A large number will meet here to-morrow to consult with W. P. Jones, of Woodstock, who is here associated with Alex Stratton in the farmers' interest. The company has entered suit

against one farmer, which will probably be made a test case.
I might say that this suit has not been brought to trial. It is evident the company has no stomach to face these farmers in a suit to collect for the fertilizer. I think this case should make it quite evident that it is necessary for the farmer to know just what he is purchasing when he is paying in the neighbourhood of $100 a ton for fertilizer. I have here a personal letter to me dated March 28. I shall not give the name of the fertilizer company, because there is a law suit pending, and I do not want to prejudice the case. The letter reads as follows:
T. W. Caldwell,	'	[DOT]
Dear Sir,-I am writing to you for advice. X bought a carload of fertilizer in 1920, and it did not prove good. Where could I send it to have it analyzed, or would it be any use, or what can I do? Write me and tell me what you think I could do, and greatly oblige,
Yours truly,
After ascertaining from the department the steps he should take to have the fertilizer analyzed, I wrote to him accordingly. This man had purchased a 20 ton carload of fertilizer, for which he had paid from $1,500 to $2,000. He has got no results from the fertilizer. Now, if the packages had been properly marked, he would have known just what he was buying and might have saved that loss.
With regard to the other clauses of the Bill, perhaps they would be more intelligible to hon. members if I read the Act as it stands now, and as it will read if this Bill becomes law. I might say, in the first place, that in the case of mixed fertilizers the manufacturer must state what proportion of phosphoric acid is available in his fertilizer. The Act says:
In the case of bone meal, tankage or other organic products and basic slag, the phosphoric acid shall be stated as total phosphoric acid unless it be desired to state available phosphoric acid also.
That is the Act as it stands. Now, Mr. Speaker, it is not desirable, from the fertilizer manufacturers' point of view, to state the available phosphoric acid, because the farmer who buys mixed fertilizers has the statement of the available phosphoric acid in that, and he is inclined to think when he buys bone meal, tankage, or basic slag that the amount of acid stated is the available phosphoric acid. As a matter of fact it is not, and it is not in the interests of the manufacturer or the dealer to state the available phosphoric acid. I desire to have the Act read as follows:

In the case of bone meal, tankage or other organic products, and basic slag, the phosphoric acid shall be stated as total phosphoric acid and the available phosphoric acid shall also be stated.
I do not see that this phraseology would entail any hardship, because it merely asks them to state the contents of their material and to show how much is available to the farmer. It is nothing but fair that this should be done. Further down, the same section provides that when potash is derived from sulphate of potash or carbonate of potash "it may be so stated in the guaranteed analysis." I suggest that instead of this being optional, as it is under the Act as at present worded, it be made a matter of compulsion to state this derivation, and I therefore propose that the section be amended to read as follows:
When potash is derived from sulphate of potash or carbonate of potash, it shall be so stated in the guaranteed analysis.
I do not think it is fair to leave it to the discretion of the manufacturer or of the dealer as to whether or not he will state that potash is derived from either of these two things. The word "may" makes it optional; I think that it is only proper that the manufacturer should state precisely what is in the product he is selling for potash. Two weeks ago potash was selling at $111 a ton, and the man that pays out that price with a view to increasing the production of his farm has a right to know just what he is getting for his mohey. During the war we were not able to get the genuine German potash salts, and as a result several substitutes were discovered. [DOT] Possibly I am using the word "discovered" in this connection in a sense not strictly correct. The material used as a substitute for potash during the war was a by j product of the sugar beet factories and analysed potash. It was known previous to the war that this product analysed potash, so that as a matter of fact it was not really a war discovery, although it was discovered while the war was on that it might be used as a substitute for the genuine potash salts, and we paid high prices for it.
I might mention that the farmers of Eastern Canada used a good deal of fertilizer on their crops, especially in the growing of potatoes. I have known a man to plant a field of potatoes, using a fertilizer containing four per cent ammonia and ten per cent phosphoric acid, and, in another part of the field, using a fertilizer compounded of four per cent ammonia, ten per cent phosphoric acid and six per cent of sugar
beet potash; and he obtained just as good results from the part of the field which had no potash. This is true not of one isolated case but of hundreds of cases in Eastern Canada. So that it has been fully demonstrated that while this potash might be all right to sell, it is really no good to grow crops. To-day they are still using this by-product of the sugar beet factories as they were during the war. Before the war it was an absolutely useless article, and only when the genuine German potash could not be obtained was this other article used as a substitute. I think that to-day, when a farmer pays $111 per ton for potash, he should know whether it is the genuine German potash salts or a byproduct of the sugar beet factories, which previous to 1914 was simply thrown upon the dump heap. I do not think that the Act should work an injury to anyone, and I would not suggest anything that would have that effect. But, as I said when introducing the Bill, I believe that the majority of the fertilizer manufacturers would welcome the amendments I propose, for the reason that they are honest and put into their fertilizers the proper ingredients. But there are a few manufacturers vjfio are evidently not putting into their stuff such chemicals as would help in the growth of plants, and, as I have said before, the man who buys these fertilizers should know what he is getting when he is paying $100 a ton and over. I trust the House will favourably consider the proposal I put forward and will see fit to adopt the Bill as I have moved it. -


Mr. P. MICHAUD (Restigouche and Madawaska) :: I have received many complaints from people in New Brunswick in regard to the fertilizer that is used in that province. The fertilizer which the farmers use there largely comes from the United States, and a large quantity is used in the growing of potato crops. This fertilizer during the past year or two has given very poor results, although the farmers have paid high enough prices for it. I am informed that the farmers will not buy any more of this fertilizer unless, as my hon. friend from Victoria and Carleton (Mr. Caldwell) proposes, a certificate be attached showing its composition. As far as I can understand, almost anything will lend itself to the manufacture of fertilizer, with a certain quantity of ammonia and certain acids added. It seems to me that the manufacturers are not giving the best satisfaction, and for that reason I support the Bill moved by my hon. friend.


Arthur Meighen: I have no objection to the Bill being read a second time, but I would not desire that the passing of the second reading should be assumed too strongly to be an assent to the principle of the Bill. I do not know that there is any very material deviation in principle in this Bill from the Act as it stands. I have been examining the amendment and the present law, but I am not competent at all to say whether the amendment proposed would be an improvement. In the province from which I come the soil is so rich that we do not need any fertilizer, and consequently- we are not very familiar with this subject. In assenting to the passing of the second reading, I may say that it is my purpose to move that the Bill be referred to the Committee on Agriculture.
Motion agreed to and Bill read the second time.


Arthur Meighen: Mr. Speaker, I move that the Bill be referred to the Select Standing Committee on Agriculture.


[Stage Direction]
Motion agreed to.
[Stage Direction]
The House again in Committee of Supply, Mr. Boivin in the Chair.
Militia and Defence-salaries, $643,751.
William Lyon Mackenzie King: Will the minister please explain this very large increase?	.


Hugh Guthrie: One night last week, I think it was on Wednesday, perhaps on Thursday, reference was made to this item, and I then gave the explanation, which I am prepared to repeat again to-night if necessary, of the increase in this item. The committee will notice that the item is marked with an asterisk and the reference where the asterisk appears on page 9 is to this effect:
These votes inoiude salaries and contingencies carried under the War Appropriations and Demobilisation Votes.
During the war practically all the temporary employees of the department were carried under Demobilization and War Appropriation votes. Now that the war is over it is desired to include them in the ordinary expenditure of the Militia Department. The figures which are to be found in the details of the item show that there will be a permanent employment for the next fiscal year of 441, but I may say

that even this statement on page 76 of the Estimates is not accurate. For the purposes of the Civil Service Commission a statement was prepared some months ago of those officers whom it was intended to make permanent in the department. That list stayed for a long time as a tentative list for the Civil Service Commission, and in the interval it was found that a good many positions could be dispensed with which were included in the tentative list. However, when the Estimates were prepared, the list was maintained in the Estimates just as it had been submitted to, and been subsequently approved by, the Civil Service Commission. Nevertheless I am glad to say that as time goes on we are able, from week to week and from month to month, to dispense with a considerable number of our officials. No less than forty-two of the 441 enumerated on page 76 have already been dispensed with and their positions can now be obliterated. They are shown in the list as permanent officials and they have been classified by the Civil Service Commission. The salaries of these 42 officials whose positions will now be obliterated involve an annual expenditure of $57,320. To make the matter clear and definite I might perhaps place on Hansard the particular positions for which no provision is asked, notwithstanding that the positions themselves appear in the classifications on page 76. I refer to these positions by number, that being the departmental number, in order that there may be no confusion, as several of the positions would appear to be the same if I did not use the number. They are as follows:
No.	Salaries
17 One senior translator	$1,800
28 One clerk stenographer	 780
105 One military topographer..	..	1,460
129 One messenger clerk	 900
150 One file clerk	 1,200
155 One file clerk		1,080
208	One senior clerk	
1,560209	One senior clerk	
1,680226 One file clerk	
960241 One senior clerk	
1,440346	One senior clerk bookkeeper ..	1,380347	One senior clerk bookkeeper . .	1,380348	One senior clerk bookkeeper ..	1,440349	One senior clerk bookkeeper ..	1,6S0351	One senior olerk bookkeeper . .	1,620352	One senior clerk bookkeeper . .	1,380353	One senior clerk bookkeeper ..	1,680354	One senior clerk bookkeeper . .	1,680355	One account clerk	
2,100360 One account clerk	
1,320375	One audit clerk.. .. t	
1,440376	One audit clerk	
1,440404	One account clerk	
1,080405	One account clerk	
1,260406	One account clerk	
1,200
No.	Salaries
408 One	account	clerk	
1,200410	One	account	clerk	
1,260411	One	account	clerk	
1,260412	One	account	clerk	
960413	One	account	clerk	
1,140384 Senior inspector, leather products	
2,100401	Asst, purchasing	agent	
2,220414	Seni-or account	clerk	1,680416	Senior olerk	
1,320417	One clerk	
960418	One clerk	
1,440419	One clerk	
1,260421	One junior	clerk	
1,080425	One clerk	
1,260426	One junior inpector, militarystores	
1,200430	One packer	and	helper	
1,020431	One packer	and	helper	
1,020
Forty-two positions are written off and the aggregate saving is $57,320. The services of these employees have now been dispensed with in the department, and it is hoped from time to time we will be ablje to considerably reduce this staff. I think that during the present year from fifty to sixty, or possibly seventy-five, of the present list will likewise be released. The question may be asked why should these be made permanent, why should they not be continued as temporaries, as their services will from time to time be dispensed with? Well, it has been found that unless you offer permanent positions to a great num-. her of these clerks it is difficult 11 p.m. to retain their services. There is an advantage it seems to be classified as a permanent employee-when your occupation ceases, or when you are let out, you still have a preference in applying for another appointment before the Civil Service Commission. They therefore say: "You must classify us as permanent even if you intend to let us out, because when we are out we do get a preference before the commission for another appointment." Many of these are very valuable assistants, many of them render services which it would be very difficult at the present time to replace in the department. We have therefore asked that they be made permanent, but they are all notified that from time to time they will be dispensed with as the work in the department decreases. The work is rapidly decreasing, we are rapidly getting back to a peace basis, but I think it will be a number of years yet before we are really back on a peace basis. The records office will have to continue with a considerable staff. The separation allowance branch and the pay allowance branch will also have to continue with a considerable staff. So to will the central registry. These branches are not 142
only essential to the Militia Department, but they are also essential for the Pensions Board, for the Soldiers' Land Settlement, and for the Department of Soldiers' Re-establishment. All the records of each case, the history of each case, all the data which is necessary for these other departments is furnished from the offices referred to, and the number of files that are daily examined are enormous; in fact in some of the departments there yet appears to be very little diminution of wartime work. But the climax, as I stated to the House, was reached in the year 1919 when we had something like 8,000 employees. On the first of January 1920 we were down to 5,200, and at the present date we have in the neighbourhood of 1,204. I gave exact figures from a memorandum which I put on Hansard last Wednesday. I can find that memorandum in a moment, if necessary.


Mr. CAHILL:: What is the strength of
the permanent force now as compared with last year?


Hugh Guthrie: The permanent force
to-day comprises 3,865 men and 447 officers. During the war, as my hon. friend probably remembers, authority was granted by statute to increase the permanent force up to 10,000. It was never found necessary to do so, but it was informally agreed that it might be increased to 5,000. However, after giving the matter very full consideration, we thought it would be just as well to keep below the 4,000 mark, and recruiting for the time being has been with the idea of not exceeding that figure. We are now at 3,865 non-commissioned ranks and 447 commissioned ranks. Our militia regiments during the present spring are recruiting splendidly, notably-in Ontario and in the West. I think by the time the summer camps come on many of the old militia units will be able to turn out at full strength, but we do not anticipate that we will train them this year at full strength, because we are not asking for a vote sufficient for that purpose. But there is something like the old militia spirit being re-established, and I think by the summer time the figures will approximate what they were in pre-war days.


Frank S. Cahill: What was the strength of the permanent force last year?


Hugh Guthrie: Speaking from recollection, I think it was 3,650.


Mr. CRERAR:: It is not the intention to go above 4,000?


Hugh Guthrie: No, we do not intend to exceed 4,000.


William Lyon Mackenzie King: This item calls for an expenditure of $643,751 for salaries. What was the amount paid prior to the war?


Hugh Guthrie: Before the war we had
only 117 clerks as against 399 at the present time, and the amount paid in the year preceding the war was $225,000.


Lawrence Geoffrey Power: Mr. Chairman, under what item will we be permitted to discuss the sub-jeet of canteen funds of the Canadian Expeditionary Force?


Hugh Guthrie: I think it could be most properly discussed on the demobilization item. The canteen fund really affects the whole war appropriation.


Lawrence Geoffrey Power: Whatever the minister
pleases. I have no objection.


Hugh Guthrie: If my hon. friend will
remind me at that time I will have the details for him.


Lawrence Geoffrey Power: Could we dicuss the militia pensions under this item?


Hugh Guthrie: The only militia pensions under my department are the long service pensions; all others are under the Pensions Board.


Lawrence Geoffrey Power: During the war all officers and men were incorporated in the perma-v nent force, and they were then asked to allow certain deductions to be made from their pay and allowances for the militia pension fund. A number of these officers iwere demobilized at the end of the war, and now on claiming a refund they are told that the matter is not within the province of the Department of Militia, I would like to be informed how these men stand. I did not know this matter was coming up this evening, but I have some correspondence on the subject from certain ex-soldiers, and I would like to have the fullest information from the minister.


Hugh Guthrie: I think I can give my
hon. friend the information he desires. The pension fund of the permanent force is administered under the provisions of the Pensions Act, and that Act provides that when a man enlists in the permanent force a certain percentage of his pay shall be deducted. That, I believe, applies only to commissioned and warrant officers. That amount so deducted forms the basis of the pension fund of Canada, and prior to the war that fund was self-sustaining. Since

the war, however, so many more pensions have been granted, and so many more men have become eligible for pensions, that the fund to-day is not self-sustaining. I assume that a continued period of peace will restore it to its pre-war position. The money deducted does not go to this department, but to the Receiver General of Canada, and there is no authority under the statute to repay to those men the amount deducted from their pay for the purposes of pension. Had these men remained in the service and continued to subscribe so much of their pay periodically to the pension fund, they would at the end of twenty years be entitled to their pensions; but having quit the service before the expiration of that term, their payments lapse into the general fund to the credit of the Receiver General and form the basis of our pension fund. But there is another provision for those who do not serve the twenty years: if they drop out we do not dock them the whole amount; we allow them a gratuity at the rate of one month's pay for every year of service in the permanent force. But there is no power in the law at present to repay to any man anything he paid to that pension fund while he was in the permanent force and enjoying the benefits of it.


Lawrence Geoffrey Power: An officer would appear to have joined the Canadian Expeditionary force. He became a member of the permanent force, and the permanent force was afterwards merged into the C.E.F. On demobilization this man was demobilized like everyone else. He was told: We kept a certain portion of your pay and allowances during the time you were in the army because you joined the permanent force, but though you are not going to benefit in any way by this pension fund; though you joined only for the period of war, we cannot give you back that money which is yours, because the Receiver General has it. There is some injustice here. If the Receiver General has the money and he owes it to these men he should repay it and the Minister should take steps to have him repay it.


Daniel Duncan McKenzie: The question has been asked here several times on the other Estimates if the Civil Service regulations had been fully adopted in the departments concerned.- Last session I was told by one of the ministers that as soon as the Civil Service Act went into full force the salaries allotted would be the full salaries of civil servants and that the bonuses would cease. Now we are told that the Act is in force;

that the work of the persons in charge of the reclassification has been completed and everything is in order; yet we find that the bonuses are still going on-and, indeed, we find dissatisfaction on the part of civil servants that there is any reduction in the bonus. I would like to know what is the position of the minister's department in this respect. Are these officials receiving the salaries assigned under the classification? If so, why the continuation of the bonus?


Hugh Guthrie: The Civil rules apply to all these 399 officials. During the war, when there was a tremendous staff in the department, the extra officials taken on *were looked upon as war employees and were paid out of the- war vote and since the war out of the demobilization vote. Now we are getting away from that principle and all civil employees in the department come under the Civil Service Commission. The military employees are not civil servants and are paid out of the military appropriation.


Mr. PARENT:: How many are still being paid out of the demobilization vote?


Hugh Guthrie: There are 804 temporary employees whom we are letting go from week to week. Last week 325 were dispensed with. Those remaining are still paid out of demobilization vote.


Daniel Duncan McKenzie: The minister did not answer my question. Are the civil servants in his department now fully installed in their respective positions under the Civil Service Act? If so, are they receiving the salaries falling to them under the classification, and if so why are we still bolstering up that classification by a bonus? Will the time ever come when we may know or civil servants may know what their salaries are?


Hugh Guthrie: The Civil Service Commission has complete jurisdiction and control over the civil employees included in the list under discussion. They have been classified; I believe there are a few whose appeals are pending. On the general question of bonus I do not think I can answer my hon. friend any more fully than the subject was dealt with by the Prime Minister a day or two ao when he was discussing this question.


Daniel Duncan McKenzie: I heard the Prime Minister say that there was to be a reduction of the bonus this year to the extent of twenty-five per cent, but I did not know
142i
that he made any further explanation. If he did, possibly it was in my absence. I do not think it is unfair that we should know definitely and finally whether or not the Civil Service Act is in full force along the lines I have mentioned.


Georges Parent: I can recall a few instances in which we have been at a loss to find out whether or not the Civil Service Commission had anything to do with the Department of Militia. We have in the city of Quebec a place where for many years past the Militia Department have had a good deal to do. They are in possession of many properties which have been kept for the last few years by civilians as guardians or some inferior positions of that kind. For instance, at No. 17 St. Louis street, they had messengers who were supposed to be civilians. A little further up the street there is, under the control of the Militia Department, another building which is called the drill hall and which has also been kept by civilians for years past. Lately, the Civil Service ^Commission interfered and intimated to certain men in charge of the drill hall that their services were no longer required, while at No. 17 St. Louis street, the Department of Militia interfered directly and intimated to the civilians in charge there that they had to get out of their jobs. Is there a special disposition in the department by which if a civilian is employed at a drill hall or at another office of the department, let us suppose it to be No. 17 St. Louis street, there are two different ways of handling such men. In both cases these men have been dismissed for one reason or another, perhaps because they are too old. Either one or the other of the two methods of dismissing these men is correct.


Hugh Guthrie: I think in both cases the men were civilian employees, and under the Act passed by this House last session with a view to improve the service, it was provided that when a man had reached a certain age, if his services could reasonably be dispensed with, they should be dispensed with.


Georges Parent: What age is that?


Hugh Guthrie: The age varies from
forty-five to sixty-five. There are various conditions attached. It so happens that in the city of Quebec there are seven individuals who have been working as civilian employees of the Militia Department, and, I think, nineteen in the city of Halifax. On the first of the present month they were

notified that there was no more work for them to do. It would be a hardship to turn these men out without some provision, and Parliament provided last session that, after a certain number of years of employment, they should be entitled to a certain retiring allowance or gratuity. These men have been displaced for one of two reasons; either there is no work for them to do, or they have reached that time of life when age prevents their doing a proper day's work. I am told that in the seven cases in the city of Quebec it is not intended to fill their places. If the work has to be carried on, there are members of the regiment there whose duty it will be to do that work, and the same is the case in the city of Halifax where there are nineteen such men. These are the men whom Parliament had in contemplation when the Act was passed last session, and they will be dealt with under that Act.


Georges Parent: That is not exactly the answer I expected. I wanted to know whether there is a special provision by which the Militia Department can interfere directly in the dismissal of men without going through the Civil Service Commission, and why under similar circumstances the Civil Service Commission can interfere. How can these two authorities manage their affairs so that we would have a uniform way of handling these men in case of dismissal?


Hugh Guthrie: If the employee was a temporary employee, we would have power to dismiss him without going to the Civil Service Commission; but these were permanent employees' and they come under the provisions of that Act of last session. In the case of permanent employees we have to go to the Civil Service Commission.


Georges Parent: I have in mind two cases of men who have been in the employ of the Militia Department for at least twenty years, both of them in exactly similar situations. Both were ordinary employees, working, practically speaking, as labourers. In the one case, the matter was handled through the Civil Service Commission; and in the other it was handled directly by the Militia Department. Can these two authorities arrange their affairs so that we may know where we are at?


Hugh Guthrie: I understand that the law was carried out in each case, and both these men were notified in due course by the Civil Service Commission and also by the Department of Militia and Defence

through the officer commanding the district there. That is the way we would give the notice.


Georges Parent: I would like'to correit
the minister in that regard. I am informed exactly to the contrary, and I know. The first intimation to one man came directly from the Civil Service Commission; in the other case it came directly from the Department of Militia and Defence. I have every voucher to prove that at any time.


Mr. FORTIER:: What has become of
those forty-two employees whose services have been dispensed with? The minister mentioned a list of forty-two employees, and I understand that most of them were permanent. Has he recommended them to the Civil Service Commission for employment in other departments, and have they secured employment in other departments?


Hugh Guthrie: As I explained to the
committee, this is a list of positions classified and approved by the Civil Service Commission. The forty-two positions which I read over have never been filled," and I am asking the committee now to strike them out of the Estimates. I went over them one by one in order that they might be identified. This is the list for filling with permanent appointments as it came from the Civil Service Commission. But between the time the list was submitted some months ago and the present time, we find it will be unnecessary to fill forty-two of these positions. Consequently, there is no one in the positions now; they will never exist; we do not intend to fill them.


Mr. PEDLOW:: Are these positions provided for in this Estimate?


Hugh Guthrie: They are in the number specified in the Estimate. This Estimate is 441; we ask for only 39!), excluding those which I enumerated. This will reduce the vote by $58,000.


Georges Parent: I find on page 76 of the Estimates this item:
Assistant to senior inspector of textile products, $2,100.
A little further down I find this:
Inspector of textile products : one at $1,680.
How is it that the assistant to senior inspector is paid $2,100 and the inspector only $1,680?


Hugh Guthrie: I am told there is a misprint. The first one named is the senior inspector, and the second one named is the junior inspector.


Mr. DECHENE:: There is a senior
inspector of hardware, a senior inspector of leather, and a senior inspector of textile products. If there is a misprint, which of these three is it?


Hugh Guthrie: There are three inspectors. The head inspector gets $2,800.


Georges Parent: Where do they perform their duties?


Hugh Guthrie: At headquarters.


Georges Parent: Are all the textile products that are used in the Militia Department inspected at Ottawa?


Hugh Guthrie: No, not all of them, but the inspectors make their headquarters at Ottawa. They travel around the districts for purposes of inspection when deliveries are made there.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: I find that we are providing for an expensive purchasing branch for the department. We are asked to provide salaries for three purchasing agents, one at $3,420, one at $2,880, and one at $1,680. All told, in connection with the purchasing of supplies for this department, there are 20 employees, made up of purchasing agents, inspectors, supply - clerks, and so forth, and the salaries included in the Estimates for these employees amount to $36,180. In this connection I would ask just what relation the Purchasing Commission bears to the purchasing branch of the Militia Department. We have an item in the Estimates of $80,000, the expenses of a Purchasing Commission. What service does that commission render to the department? Does the department call the commission to its assistance, and if so, to what extent? Is the Militia Department governed by .the decisions of the commission ?


Mr. CURRIE:: There .were four purchasing agents in the Militia Department, but in the list of 42 names to be struck off which I read there is one purchasing agent at a salary of $2,220. That will leave three purchasing agents, as stated on page 76. All the purchasing for the Militia Department is done by the Purchasing Commission. All the material sold by the Militia Department has been sold to the same commission. Not a dollar's worth has been sold or bought direct by the department. The purchasing agents act also as requisition clerks. They look over the stores and find out what is required, and in what district it is required, and make out a requisition for the goods. This requisition
is submitted first to the Deputy Minister for his approval, and if it is over $500 it has to be approved by the minister; then it goes to the Purchasing Commission. I understand that in every case tenders are called for and the Purchasing Commission awards the contract. After it is awarded, and all the formalities are complied with, we notify the successful firm that their tender has been accepted, and after delivery we ourselves inspect the goods and the Department of Militia pays for them.


Fred Langdon Davis: What is the total amount of purchases that these purchasing agents are called upon to supervise?


Hugh Guthrie: It is in the neighbourhood of $4,000,000 at the present time. In years gone by, of course, that figure was multiplied by many times. Since demobilization we have sold between $7,000,000 and $8,000,000 of supplies, and have turned that amount into the treasury.


Georges Parent: Does the Purchasing
Commission now buy everything that is needed by the Militia Department?


Hugh Guthrie: Yes, I am told that it buys every dollars worth.	.


Georges Parent: If such were the case, I would presume that the commission must have their own inspectors, but I see that the department has a senior inspector of hardware, for instance, a senior inspector of leather products, and a senior inspector of textile products. Is the commission restricted to the purchase of goods other than hardware, leather and textile products? What is the commission doing if it has nothing to do with the purchase of textile products, which is probably the biggest single item the department buys?


Hugh Guthrie: I fancy that leather,
textiles, and hardware are among the largest of our purchases. The Commission does not maintain its own inspectors. All the work preliminary to the purchase, including the requisitioning and advertising, is done by the department. The purchasing commission really make the purchase in that they decide who shall have the contract. After the contract has been awarded, the Department of Militia receives the goods, inspects them, and pays for them, but it has no part in the actual purchase of the goods.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: From the information given by the minister it would seem that the commission performs a very infinitesimal

part of the work, and that it is really an unnecessary wheel in the transaction. The department advertises for tenders, examines the samples submitted, decides on the amount and the quality of the goods required, and inspects them when they have been delivered. In view of that, I submit that the commission is entirely unnecessary to transacting the business. The minister and his deputy and staff should be quite capable of dealing with the whole thing from start to finish. The trifling part done by the commission is merely of a supervisory character, and seems absolutely worthless. Would the minister allow the commission to over-rule his decision in the matter of a purchase?


Hugh Guthrie: I would have no decision to over-rule in the matter of a purchase. I have not contended anything for the purchasing commission. There may be a great deal in what my hon. friend says, but when I became Minister of Militia that was the system, and it has been continued. I am not at the moment discussing the merits or demerits of the purchasing commission. That is the system which obtains to-day, and it is a very exacting system. We open the tenders, but in the presence of the commission. Then we tabulate them, re-submit the tabulated tenders to the commission, and the commission itself awards the contract.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: In the estimation of the minister, does the commission perform any work of real value to his department?


Hugh Guthrie: Well, it is considered ' that the commission is a great safeguard in the matter of purchases.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: Can the minister give an instance wherein they have been a safeguard?


Hugh Guthrie: I suppose, in every
instance; but in no outstanding instance that I am aware of in connection with the Militia Department.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: Could not the minister and his deputy do the work entirely independent of the commission?


Hugh Guthrie: It would have been impossible to do so during the war.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: But now?


Hugh Guthrie: I have confidence
enough in my own judgment and in the ability of the deputy minister to say "yes;" but I do not know that that would satisfy

public opinion in the matter, nor do I know that it would be a proper course for the .Government, as a whole, to pursue. I am not prepared to discuss the merits or demerits of the commission; there may be two opinions on that question.


Georges Parent: Are these inspectors, to whom we refer, the same men that made recommendations in connection with purchases in regard to textiles or leather goods during the war?


Hugh Guthrie: Yes; they have been in the service fifteen or twenty years, and they purchased all through the war. Of course, the staff was much larger during the war.


Georges Parent: Does the inspector of leather products inspect all saddles, bridles, etc., under the Militia Department?


Hugh Guthrie: Yes.


Georges Parent: And is the inspection
made before or after the purchase?


Hugh Guthrie: The inspection applies to all leather goods, boots, saddles, belts, etc., and it goes on all through the process of manufacture also. We go right to the factories and inspect while the goods are being manufactured; we also inspect the leather before it goes into the factory.


Georges Parent: As I understand it, the order is given for the manufacture of saddles, for instance, by the purchasing commission, and then the inspector goes and inspects the goods.


Hugh Guthrie: After the tender has been accepted, and before the goods are manufactured, the leather is inspected, and the inspection is carried on during the process of manufacture and at the final completion.


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: What is the salary
paid the chief engineer and controller of military lands? I see an Estimate for a senior assistant engineer; I suppose there is a chief engineer who is assisted by this man. What is the salary paid the chief?


Hugh Guthrie: The chief engineer and controller of military lands is Mr. McKenna, whose salary was $2,800. I understand that as a result of an appeal he put in he has now been allowed $3,000.


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: This Estimate provides for a senior assistant engineer and controller of military lands at $3,300, so that apparently the assistant is getting $500 more than the chief. How is that"


Hugh Guthrie: I see the first one; I do not see the second one to whom you refer.


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: I asked, first of all, who was the chief engineer and what salary he was paid, and the minister gave the name of the official and said he received $2,800 a year. I want to know now how it is that the senior assistant receives $3,300 or $500 more than his chief?


Hugh Guthrie: Twenty-eight hundred dollars was what Mr. McKenna was getting, but he appealed and was allowed $3,300; not $3,000, as I said a moment ago.


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: Is there any chief
engineer? I only see an assistant here.


Hugh Guthrie: The chief engineer, I ought to have said, is Colonel Houliston, on the military staff. He draws the pay of his rank, $4,700.


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: He does not appear in the Estimates?
* Mr. GUTHRIE: No.


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: Now, who is the chief
architect and what is his salary?


Hugh Guthrie: The chief architect is
the chief engineer, Colonel Houliston. Then there is under him a military construction engineer at $3,060.


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: Has he any other
assistant?


Hugh Guthrie: Also Mr. McKenna.


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: What is his salary?


Hugh Guthrie: I have already given
it; there is another clerk besides Mr. McKenna and the construction engineer of whom I have spoken.


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: What is the salary of
this clerk?


Hugh Guthrie: He gets $2,340; he is
classified as assistant engineer.


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: Is he the same man
as the assistant architect?
Mr. GUTHRIE r No, this is an assistant engineer; he does the duties of an architect-clerk..


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: As I understand the
minister, there are two men, one assistant engineer and one assistant architect, and as we are informed now that the assistant engineer does the work of the assistant architect there is no need for paying two salaries.


Hugh Guthrie: There are three officials besides Colonel Houliston; one military, construction engineer, one assistant engineer, and one assistant architect. These are not new appointments, these men have been there many years.


Georges Parent: Will the minister say
whereabouts on page 76 or elsewhere Colonel Houliston's position is mentioned?


Hugh Guthrie: Not at all; he is a
member of the Permanent Force.


Georges Parent: Is he working for pleasure, or does he get remuneration?


Hugh Guthrie: He is on the Permanent Force.


Georges Parent: What is his designation?


Hugh Guthrie: Director of Engineers'
Services.


Georges Parent: Is the deputy minister
on the permanent force?


Hugh Guthrie: Yes.


Georges Parent: Then why is he mentioned at page 76?


Hugh Guthrie: Because he occupies
two positions, Major-General of the staff, and deputy minister on the civil list.


Joseph Bruno Aimé Miville Déchêne: Does the other gentleman occupy two positions also?


Hugh Guthrie: No.


Fred Langdon Davis: In this connection it is apparent that there is a steady reduction of the staff in operation now. Has the minister formed any estimate of the point to which the staff can be brought, and what further reductions are likely to take place? That is the first matter I would like to get some information on. The second question: Is that estimate on a peace basis and is it an estimate for what he would consider the permanent staff when we are out of the confusion and additional work that was caused by the war and the demobilization?


Hugh Guthrie: The number of permanent employees will now be 399; before the war it was 117. It will be necessary to retain for a number of years a large staff in the Record Office due entirely to the war, the estimated number being 74. In the Separation Allowance and Assigned Pay Branch we will have to retain a staff estimated at 50, and in the Central Registry Office a staff of 43. In these three offices the increased staff on account of the war work alone will be 167. I am not able to form any definite estimate of the length

of time during which it will be necessary to employ that number but from year to year it will be reduced. Our estimate is that of the permanent officials during the present year-from now on and to the end of the next fiscal year-probably the staff will be reduced by from sixty to seventy-five. The non-payment staff, which to-day amounts to 852 throughout the whole Dominion is being very rapidly reduced. Three hundred and twenty-five were let out on the first of the present month, others will be let out on the first of May, but the permanent officials will be retained for many years to come. The Pensions Board could not function without these officials, neither could the Soldiers' Settlement Board, neither could the Department of Soldiers' Civil Re-establishment. There are other branches of the Government too which are absolutely dependent on these war records and the information contained in these offices. There are a tremendous amount of outstanding accounts for separation allowance and for various kinds of military pay and deferred pay. The work is gradually being reduced but its volume is still tremendous. In the three branches I have mentioned let me tell the committee that the correspondence for January last ran to 96,000 letters. That is incoming mail; the outgoing mail is fully as great. In the record office alone for the month of December the incoming correspondence numbered 25,407; the outgoing correspondence 21,747. The number of names that had to be searched, checked and compiled, and sent to the war office for medals alone numbered 27,394; the papers filed there for registration totaled 110,000 separate documents; the inquiries answered, involving the research of these documents for various departments numbered 120,923; the grave register, sheets despatched to the Imperial authorities 1,232; there are 30,000 grave registers yet to be completed; estates distributed-that is in this month-118; new estates received in December last 43; awards distributed to soldiers 13,634. Hollerith cards punched during that month,
300,000.	I would like some members of the committee to visit the record officd. I state that because I believe it is the most complete and up-to-date record office that exists, perhaps in the world, to-day. Newspaper men and expert accountants have gone through that office. Griffenhagen and Company, the experts employed by the Government, examined it, and whether their certificate be duly valid or not, let me say that they have pronounced it the most

complete record office that could be devised. I think that if some members of the committee would visit that office they would have a very high opinion of the work being done there, and too much credit cannot be given to the officer in charge of the work that is being recorded in the Daly building near the Chateau Laurier hotel.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: I have great pleasure in associating myself with the observations made by the minister in reference to the work of the record office. I have had occasion to visit that branch many times during the past few years and I have not only found the work being efficiently performed but the employees were most courteous, obliging, attentive
12 m. and capable. The minister has associated with his endorsation of the office the firm of Griffenhagen and Company. I wonder if he also endorses their work, a report of which I have in my hand. I think the report which I now hold was the product of that firm which assisted in the classification of the Civil Service of Canada.


Joseph Archambault: Is it in German?


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: No, it has been issued by direction of the Civil Service Commission. Now I understand this report classifies the work of the various departments of the public service and also apportions the salaries that the several employees are to receive. I notice that on page 410 of this publication the classification specifies the classification of Inspector of Hardware-


Joseph Archambault: It is a hard job.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: 
Hugh Guthrie: I can only say that the Griffenhagen firm, for some reason, did not see fit to examine the salaries of the officials in the Militia Department-I do not think they made any report on that subject. They may have in other departments. I can only say that the inspectors of textiles and hardware in that department have been there for over fifteen years and are very experienced men. ^ They rereceived before they were classified by the ceive to-day exactly the salary which they Civil Service Commission.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: That may be so. But
you say their services must have been intended to apply to other departments. There are no other departments that I know of which require leather and textiles.


Hugh Guthrie: Yes, the Mounted
Police and the Post Office get all those things. As a matter of fact, they made no examination of the Militia Department,
I am informed.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: Of no branch of the
Militia Department?


Hugh Guthrie: Not that I know of.
They did of the Record Office.


Some hon. MEMBERS:: A social call.


Hugh Guthrie: No.	^


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: I have asked the same
question, Mr. Chairman, of several ministers, and they have given me practically the same answer. I wonder if those men carried on their inspection by walking up and down Sparks street or Wellington street or in the park. They certainly made this report, but apparently without inspecting any department at all so far as I can find out. Their recommendations have been entirely ignored all through the service.


Joseph Archambault: They inspected
the International bridge.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: In connection with this
item, I find there is one junior clerk-stenographer getting $1,300, whereas very few of the clerk-stenographers are getting as much as that-as a matter of fact only one. I take it for granted that a clerk-stenographer is a more competent and exdisappear.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: Are they all gone?


Hugh Guthrie: One at $1,200 will disappear, and another at $960.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: That is the only one?


Joseph Archambault: That is the
cheap one.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: I would like to know the reason why that particular junior clerk-stenographer gets $1,300-actually more than the clerk-stenographers' who, I presume, are capable of doing more expert work. Then I see at the top of the list there is a clerk-stenographer at $1,500.


Hugh Guthrie: I am told that that
clerk-stenographer at $1,500 was classified by the Civil Service Commission at a lower amount than the stenographer was receiving heretofore.


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: But what about the
junior clerk-stenographer who is rated as $1,300?


Hugh Guthrie: That is because under
the old classification she had reached that salary and was classified by the commission at the salary she was then receiving. She could elect under the Act-


Isaac Ellis Pedlow: That rule obtains all
through the service?


Hugh Guthrie: No. She had the privilege under the Civil Service Act to elect whether she would retain her old classification.


Mr. SINCLAIR (Guysborough):: The
minister seems to be starting a new map department, which I protest against. We have been constantly told by the Interior Department that they have built up an equipment for making maps for all the departments of the Government, and they are spending a great deal of money on that branch. At page 81 you will see that they have twelve principal map draftsmen drawing salaries aggregating $29,820; 30 senior map draftsmen at $61,220; 26 map draftsmen at 41,935; one junior map draftsman at $1,020; 2 principal draftsmen at $4,800; 4 senior draftsmen at $7,590; 6 draftsmen at $9,350, making altogether $164,855 for

the Interior Department and a number of clerks besides connected with the map branch. I note my hon. friend is starting to build up a map department, which seems to be unnecessary in view of the explanation that we have received from the Interior Department. There are two new officers, and there is also a copper plate map engraver, which is a new office apparently started this year. We require some explanation as to why maps are made at all in his department when there is a full equipment for that purpose in the Interior Department.


Hugh Guthrie: There is something to
be said in favour of the consolidation of the map departments that are-working on surveys. In the United States I understand all the survey work as well as all the engineering work is done in the war department. In our Militia Department we have to maintain a surveys branch. Map drawing is part of the military education of a soldier, and during the late war it was of more avail probably than ever before in the history of war. General Currie impressed upon me the necessity of maintaining that branch to teach the officers who are to instruct our militia officers not only how to draw maps and to engrave them, but how to read them. I believe that all the surveying in Canada might be placed under the Department of Militia to the advantage of the country. We have most competent surveyors and engineers from our Royal Military college, men absolutely trained for this very necessary part of their military education. Sir Frederick Borden when Minister of Militia first established this branch in 1908 on the recommendation of General Lake. During the war the service was considerably increased. At that time we had ten additional civilian topographical engineers and one additional civilian employed as a military topographer. Only two have been added to the permanent list. Those who are most competent to advise on these matters, such as Sir Arthur Currie and the present chief of the General Staff, General McBrian, are most insistent on our maintaining this small survey branch, the total appropriation for which is $35,000. Its value is chiefly in the training given, but the maps turned out are the finest produced in the Dominion, and there is a very large demand for them, particularly by motorists. However, that is a minor incident. The topographical survey has been proceeding since 1909. Only a small patch of the map of Canada has as yet been com-[Mr. Sinclair.!
pleted. The work will go on for many years; it may never be a completed map. At the same time, we are giving the necessary instructions and map drawing is one of the essential features of army work.


Georges Parent: Is the minister aware that when war was declared and Valcartier camp was established there was no map in the Militia Department of the road from Quebec city to Valcartier?


Hugh Guthrie: I understand that is correct, that portion of Canada has since been completed.


Georges Parent: I have only one remark to make and that is with reference to the inspector of leather products. I understand from the' minister that the inspector of either leather products or textile products makes recommendations to the Purchasing Commission but that the actual purchase is made by the Purchasing Commission. I would like to see the same principle applied when the Miljtia Department has goods to sell, because I understand that a good many things have been sold by that department, especially in the way of leather goods. For instance, not long ago I read in the Ottawa Citizen a statement to the effect that a good many hundreds of saddles, brand new, were packed in cellars in Ottawa, having been sold without any inspection whatever by the Department of Militia, and that these saddles, practically as good as new, were even sold as scrap.
I hope that the inspector of leather goods will not content himself with inspection only when the department purchases goods but will see that inspection is made when the department has goods to sell, so that the purchasing department may be informed as to the condition of the goods and thus be in a position to get a price for them more nearly approximating their real value. The statement to which I refer may have escaped the attention of the minister, but it was published in the Ottawa Citizen under these headlines. The statement went further and said that the men who purchased these new saddles or bridles cut strips from them which they could replace for ten cents Or so in order that the goods might pass as second-hand. The people of Canada, therefore, lost thousands of dollars in that particular instance.


Hugh Guthrie: No sale of militia supplies has taken place until the goods have been examined by a competent board, full inquiry made, and the goods condemned.

The only exception would be in the case of surplus war stores, purchased expressly ^for the war, for which there was no use or not likely to be any use-goods which would deteriorate and become useless, I did not see the article in the Citizen to which my hon. friend refers, but I will make inquiries about it. I have been told since by hon. friend mentioned the matter that the department did not buy saddles except in the early years of the war. All our saddle purchases went overseas; consequently there could not have been a cellar full of new saddles in Ottawa. But I am going to make a note of my hon. friend's statement and make inquiry. I assure him that the greatest care was taken in the sale of this material. We had no power ourselves to sell it; we inspected it, condemned it and passed it to what was the war purchasing commission, who sold it and received and paid over the money. I think the aggregate of their sales was something over $7,000,000.


William Lyon Mackenzie King: May I ask my hon. friend if he does not think it reasonable that the committee should not report progress at this hour? It was eleven o'clock before we entered upon these Estimates. It was understood that Monday would be private members' day, and nothing was said as to going on with Militia Estimates when we were through with the private members proceeedings. This is a very important item and one which the committee may wish to discuss at some length.


Hugh Guthrie: If there is good reason for standing it over I have no objection. But I do not think there should be any surprise at the Militia Estimates coming on to-night. I know I have been waiting every Monday and Tuesday for the last three weeks to go on with them. However, if there is no desire to go further with the item I have no objection to the committee rising.


The CHAIRMAN (Mr. Steele):: It is moved by Mr. Guthrie that item No. 5 be reduced by $57,320. Is it the pleasure of the committee to adopt the motion?


[Stage Direction]
Amendment agreed to.
Hugh Guthrie: Do I understand that the item is not passed-just the amendment?


Georges Henri Boivin: Just the amendment.


Hugh Boulton Morphy: I notice that there are three photographers, one at $1,920, one at $1,080 and one at $1,560; total, $4,560. What are the duties of these photographers and why are there so many in the department?


Hugh Guthrie: I had a memorandum prepared on that, as follows:
In the Surveys Branch, a senior photographer, Mr.. Xi. G. Smith and an assistant, Mr. J. Martell, are employed in photo-lithographing the military maps prepared in the branch. This is special, expert work, requiring a special training, including as it does, not merely the photographing of the maps but the preparation of plates for lithographing. Both Mr. Smith and his assistant, Mr.. Martell, are experts and have had years of training in this work. They could, perhaps, more properly, be described as photo-lithographers.
Mr. Smith got his training in the War Office ; and has been with the Survey's Branch ever since 1914, when the military maps were first lithographed in the department. Before that, it had been necessary to send our maps to the War Office to be lithographed.
Mr. Smith's work was classified by the Civil Service Commission, last year, at $1,800 per annum, with an annual increase of $120. This accounts for the amount in the Estimates.
Mr. Martel'l has been employed in the Department, temporarily, sinde November, 1915, and was classified by the Civil Service Commission at $9'60, with an annual increase of $60. His permanent appointment is considered necessary owing to the normal increase in the volume of work.
The third photographer in the Department is Mr. C. J. Wallis of the printing, stationery and1, contingencies branch. Mr. Wallis' work is mainly making photostat prints of vouchers, statements, and other documents for various branches of the department. He has been temporarily employed since October 1915, and his work now serve# many of the branches of the department. Its volume has increased rather than diminished during the last year. For the last 51 years, Mr. Wallis has made an average of somewhat over 2,100 photostat and photograph prints per month. The average for the eleven months ending February 28, is 2,459.
The work includes making copies of cheques, attestation papers, lists and vouchers of various kinds in connection with claims dealt with by the S.A. & A.P., record's and accounts branches, also photostat copies of pay-lists, elaborate tabulated statements and photographs of sealed patterns to accompany specifications. In cases where fac-simile reproduction is essential, as where an original signature is required, a photostat copy is indispensable, and would have to be obtained outside the department if not within.
Where many copies have to be made of elaborate tabulated statements, pay-lists, etc., the work is more quickly and much better done by photostat than by any other means.


Joseph Archambault: A question asked a minute ago by the hon. member for Quebec West (Mr. Parent) reminds me that last year the House was informed that, amongst the goods sold to Roumania, there

was quite a large quantity of military equipment. If I remember aright the number of the report of last year is No. 37, and it was reported that as much as $300,000 worth of military equipment was sold to Roumania. I understand the Government paid the representatives of companies like the Sherwin-Williams Paint Company, the Maritime Nail Company, the Brantford Roofing Company, the Monarch Knitting Company, or those companies, with good Canadian money, and that the Government is still waiting for Roumania to pay back that money. In the case of military equipment which was sold by private companies to Roumania, who will pay for this? What will be the process of payment? Will the Government wait till Roumania decides to pay, or what has been done? What has been paid?


Hugh Guthrie: My information at the moment is that the Militia Department did not sell any of this equipment to Roumania; that it was sold by the War Purchasing Commission to the Canadian Trade Commission, and that the latter commission subsequently disposed of it, but I am not familiar with the way in which it was disposed of.


Andrew Ross McMaster: Who was the ultimate consumer?


Hugh Guthrie: I do not know, but it
might possibly be Roumania, I did hear, not m the department, but incidentally on the street-and I cannot verify the statement- that some military cloth, or some cloth that had been manufactured for military purposes, had been sold to some outside concern in Montreal, and that the ultimate destination of that cloth was Roumania.


Joseph Archambault: The minister is probably misinformed.


Hugh Guthrie: I will get the exact
information for my hon. friend.


Fred Langdon Davis: I understand that there is a very elaborate and complete photographing plant in connection with the Natural Resources aricT Intelligence Branch. That branch during the war did a great deal of reproduction work and record work of one sort or another, and it looks as if this was a case where there might be greater coordination of offices.


Hugh Guthrie: Perhaps it is possible, but I think the photographic plant to which my hon. friend refers is more for advertising purposes, more in the nature of an advertising plant. I do not think there is
[Mr. ArchambaultJ
any map engraving plant of this kind in Canada except the one in the Militia Department.


Fred Langdon Davis: As regards reproduction
of maps, especially blue-prints, at one time it was not possible to make these. They have a large machine there which simply runs the paper through like a large type press, making the copies in that way for a very few cents, whereas formerly they had cost very much more.


Thomas Wakem Caldwell: I notice one official
on the list this year who was not on Iasi year-director of separation allowance and assigned pay. Why is this?


Hugh Guthrie: He has been on since
the beginning of the war. Prior to the war I do not think we had him. He has been paid out of war vote and demobilization vote. He is a permanent official.


Thomas Wakem Caldwell: I imagine the department follow the usual custom of the Government in putting returned men in all these offices. Is this man a returned soldier?


Hugh Guthrie: They are not all returned men; but as far as it is possible to adopt the system of appointing returned men, we have adopted it. There are in the department some men who have been there for a long time and whose services are practically indispensable. So far as possible we have weeded out all men who have not had overseas service.


Thomas Wakem Caldwell: In the weeding out
process was a man by the name of Douglas weeded out of this department?


Hugh Guthrie: What W'as his rank?


Thomas Wakem Caldwell: I understood he was paymaster in the assigned pay branch.


Hugh Guthrie: There was in that
branch a man named Douglas, whose services were dispensed with for certain reasons which I will give to my hon. friend after adjournment if that will suit him.
Progress reported.
On motion of Hon. Mr. Ballantyne the House adjourned at 12.35 a.m. Tuesday.
Tuesday, April 19. 1921.